The following is an answer and/or comment by inhahe aka ColorStorm (inhahe.com - myriachromat.wordpress.com).

Quora question: Is there a relationship between heart transplantation and recipient*s emotions and personality?

I read once a story of someone who had gotten a heart transplant, and sometimes he would hear (or dream? I don’t remember, this was a long time ago) a ticking sound, which was presumably the sound of the turn signal ticking in the car after the accident that killed the heart’s donor.

The story also said that his tastes changed, such as his taste in food, etc. I don’t remember the details. It may also have said that they discovered the past tastes of the previous owner of the heart and saw that it matched, but not positive on that. I don’t remember if it said much about changes in his personality per se.

Sorry my information is vague and anecdotal and I don’t have the reference to cite anymore. But reading that article strongly suggested to me that personality traits (at least if you include tastes among personality traits) and other non-physical things may transfer from one person to another in the event of an organ transplant, and I don’t see any other answers to the question yet so I thought I’d answer.

I, like many others, believe that emotions, thoughts, personality dispositions, and other such things aren’t merely neurochemical actions or states in the brain, and that latent emotions, personality dispositions, maybe even thoughts, etc. may sometimes be stored in, or may even principally exist in, our cells or organs themselves. Life (as in consciousness, awareness, experience, etc.) is not just an emergent property of neurochemical action, and its patterns exist on various levels of density from the intangible all the way down to matter. The cells could store the energies related to or composing one’s life force but not specifically within their material configurations or at least not solely within them.

The material body and its “life force” do not exist in some categorically dualistic dichotomy, nor in the popularly supposed sense in which one reduces to the other or is a romantic way of referring to traits of the other; instead they are merely different types of patterns that all exist within the same continuum of reality and relate to each other and work together holistically, and on the most-dense level of that spectrum we find what we currently know how to scientifically measure, can biological-sensorially apprehend, and call “matter.”

Perhaps whether this is the case is the very thing you’re trying to infer through evidence, though, which is definitely a noble pursuit. Either way, perhaps some aspects of my particular modelling of the issue are ideas you haven’t come across before and could find useful.

[Edit: added more below]

The idea that organ transplants can’t affect personality because emotions and personality exist solely within the brain and derive solely from brain activity is scientistic. We do know of many correlations between specific emotions, faculties of perception, etc. and conscious experience, but there is no way to scientifically know that consciousness, emotions, etc. merely reduce to those things, because identification of emotions and consciousness itself is inherently subjective.

(Yes, you could devise a scientific way of detecting consciousness, but it would ultimately be founded upon correlations found between brain state and reported or subjectively inferred state of consciousness; the model that actually explains the connection is incomplete or nonexistent, and such a test is therefore subject to possible error.)

So the idea that consciousness, experience, thoughts, emotions, etc. reduce to physical processes can never be anything but a theory. It’s tantamount to seeing a television set showing a movie and noticing that you can modify or even completely black out the picture shown on screen by manipulating the electronics of the television set, breaking it, holding a magnet up to it, etc., and then concluding that the contents of the movie must therefore be generated by the television set.

Here is an interesting argument ad absurdum (not mine) against the possibility of consciousness being the result of neural activity:

Playback argument (why a neural network can’t be conscious)

Why a neural network can’t be conscious (2)

Physicalism, aka materialism aka naturalism, the idea that everything that exists is necessarily physical, is another main factor involved in the scientistic belief that emotions, personality, etc. must be products of the brain and therefore can have nothing to do with other organs, unless there are discovered, known, physical mechanisms of communication between the organ in question and the brain that could account for it. Scientism and rationalism generally make the error of assuming something is impossible by default: if a mechanism isn’t known or one lacks the capacity for imagining a possible mechanism by which something can happen, it’s assumed impossible.

Physicalism and mechanicism are the worldview du jour of the scientific community and acadamia, and it’s taken as unquestioned truth in those arenas, but it’s not proven and can’t be proven. There can be no scientific evidence against physicalism because evidence as scientifically defined and accepted is necessarily physical. Thus physicalism is an unfalsifiable theory, and in science unfalsifiable theories are considered bad theories.

There have been plenty of successful experiments in the field of parapsychology, indicating that minds are probably more than relatively isolated sacks of meat, but the scientific community laughs anyone who supports those endeavors out of the community. People erroneously assume that if it were ever proven that any kind of psychic phonemenon existed, it would take the scientific community by storm and our current paradigms would be rocked to their foundation, but that’s simply not the cases. Atlas shrugged. Scientists are human with their own biases after all.

Because of the amazing efficacy of physics in manipulating and predicting the world as we physical-sensorially know it (within certain limited domains), scientists are misled into assuming that the principles of physics, chemistry, et al and the elements they apply to are the end-all and be-all of the universe.

So if you want to learn about the successes in parapsychology you actually have to read books by paranormal researchers—those scientists who are not in the field are generally way too biased against it to give any useful information.

Sorry, I know I went into a huge digression there, but I couldn’t help myself; it’s all ultimately related to the original question, or at least to the intent behind it or to its profound and far-reaching implications.