It's All About Me

by Michele Driver

I saw this story about a guy who received a heart transplant with tragic results. I searched and found other stories where people who received transplants had personality changes ( see here and here for starters). I truly understand the need for transplantation (I am an insulin-dependent diabetic who will probably face some sort of organ failure in the near future) but am kind of creeped out by the idea of having someone else's body parts inside me. I really don't think I'd go for it. God created me the way I am for a reason and I don't want to screw with that. Maybe I haven't been desperate enough yet. But this raises all sorts of questions about the person as a whole - I am ME in every single one of my cells, right? DNA and all that. So why shouldn't I also be ME in all my organs? Who's to say the heart really isn't an organ of memory, too? Athletes talk about muscle memory and we've all experienced it to one degree or another. My heart as well as my mind can remember all the hurts and joys I've experienced if I am ME in every cell. Would you trade memories or personality with someone if it meant you could live longer? Tell me your thoughts!

Comments

[JM Inc.]

I'm interested in the causes of this so-called... "systematic cellular memory phenomenon." I very much echo the opinion that anecdotal evidence isn't much evidence at all, but I don't suspect for a moment that these people are making it up.

There currently exists no known good reason to believe that non-nervous tissue stores memory information in the same way that nervous tissue does, but what's important to remember is the delicate relationship between brain and body. We know, for instance, that kinaesthetic intelligence is very closely related to the way we experience emotional events - people who are highly aware of bodily functions such as heartbeat report stronger emotional responses, and show stronger such responses in brain scans, to similar emotional triggers.

Our brains are highly plastic, we all know this. What's beginning to be discovered is that our brains aren't pre-wired for bodies of a certain type. Brains wire and rewire themselves in situ to meet the specific kinaesthetic demands of the body. V.S. Ramachandran has done some very exciting work on this subject, showing how, for instance, you can cause amputees who experience painful phantom limbs to lose their phantoms by the careful playing of clever illusory tricks on the senses. I suspect that these anecdotal cases have to do with something similar - heart muscles which work in a slightly different fashion to the ones a particular brain is wired to operate, and so on. Muscle memory is largely the same thing. Organs like kidneys and hearts and such play important hormonal feedback roles - it wouldn't be surprising if these were correlated.

Additionally, as has recently been discovered, you're not "you" (genomically spoken) in all of your cells. Aside from the obvious fact that all our cells contain multitudes of different, though inconsequential (or in some cases carcinogenic), mutations, we all contain lots of cells that aren't "ours" at all. The most common examples of such microchimerism are mothers containing cells from children and vice versa. As it turns out, very few cases of cellular chimerism are as blatantly apparent as, for instance, individuals with patchy alternating black and white skin, although these individuals were the ones who initiated interest in research into chimerism (as it turns out, this paid off).

Would I trade memory/personality with somebody in order to live longer? Or would I trade organs/tissues in order to live longer? They're different, though related questions. I don't know about you, but as far as I know, I am my brain.

And as far as I am my brain, I'm always changing and growing, I'm always rewriting my own microstructure; I'm not today the same person I was sixteen years ago and I can only hope that I won't be the same person I am today in sixteen years' time.

In a very real way, the answer to both of these questions is that we all already do. We're not the same energy in our bodies that we were before and we won't be again for a while. We flush out all of our proteins, all of our water, every amino acid sequence, every neurotransmitter, every droplet of acetylcholinesterase - it all gets ditched and the whole cycle (from completely new set to completely new set) takes several months. Cells come and go, and some cells stay longer than others (like brain cells that last for decades or more), but even so, the stuff they're made of goes.

So, would I consciously help the process along in order to live longer? No doubt I would. I’m not my genes, or for that matter my body, although, for the moment, these are important defining characteristics of mine. Now, there might be limits to how much memory/personality I'd dump AT ONCE, but I suppose if I were facing death it'd start looking like a pretty good deal (in a something over nothing sort of sense).

I find it queer, Michele, although you probably know better than I do how you feel about it, that you seem (in this entry, at least) to be quite hung up on the material consistency of your body being in some sense unique to you, yet you mentioned unperturbedly that you make use of insulin manufactured by customised bacteria. Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you mean in the other segments of the entry?

[Michele Driver]

JM, thanks for all the interesting info you submitted. Believe me, if I had any way of staying alive other than taking insulin, I would. I suppose that since I don't remember much before being diagnosed at age six I've never thought about what exactly I am injecting four times a day. It has been something I have done all my conscious life. Since I am a Christian refusing insulin is not an option, as that decision is literally suicide for me. (And it would be a horrible and slow death.) As to what I would do if I did need a kidney transplant, I really cannot say. It doesn't mean that I'm not still creeped out by the idea of someone else's organs being in my body. That's why I posted this. I wanted to know what other people thought about it.

[Stephen Blaxton]

to quote JPII "you are your body." The issue that JM brings up is one that I've been exposed to quite a bit after taking some philosophy classes here at Franciscan University. It is very much not the case that we are only our brains. In the same way that we are not only the cells which make up our skin which flake and can gather disgustingly in a very conspicuous manner on a black shirt, we cannot isolate one organ as the origin of our being. Our brain gives us consciousness and it is through our brain that one interprets the sensory experiences we have every day. Here's a dramatic example for you: if someone believes that their brain constitutes who they are, then there should be no moral dilema in killing someone who has been knocked out or is in a very deep sleep. We are our bodies in that when you talk to somone or relate to them you're not talking to their eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, or hairy mole, rather you're talking to the person, the incommunicable person which makes up the material body. You can't separate the two. You don't fall in love with an organized piece of flesh, but you do experience the person through their flesh. When you pat someone on the back in congratulations, the person experiences the pat on the back as a sign of congratulation not simply as pressure from someones hand. The soul experiences the congratulations through the sensory experience of the pat on the back. Regarding the body in this manner allows one to grasp more fully the proufundity of the marital union as well.

JM if you'd you like to see where your philosophy will lead when carried out, read Peter Singer. If you'd like to understand how the body and soul are one, read Love and Responsibility and Theology of the Body by John Paul II.

Michelle, bioethics is way cool and way complex and there's no easy answer to your questions. You might consider what exactly makes you feel weird about carrying a donated organ and if feeling weird about something is sufficient reason for determining a course of action? My initial thought is that feeling weird about something is a legitmate response that should be weighed, but on the other hand should it not be man's intention to use technology in the promotion of life no matter how weird it might feel? The ethical guideline I know is that one should never act contrary to life. I guess the question then becomes are you acting against life to intentionally not use a means that will prolong a life that still has potential for being healthy?

[JM Inc.]

Stephen's right, Michele. This is a personal experience that we all need to think about and come to our own conclusions on. Just as I would expect not to be denied a life-saving organ or tissue transplant, I would not want to compel the performance of one if it wasn't desired by a free-willed, non-duressed person.

I wouldn't agree with the assertion that feeling weird is a legitimate response (read here: 'rational response'), but it really is something that YOU, personally, need to take into consideration. On the whole I try not to let my initial feelings on an issue carry me away, although I'm sure I fail far more miserably in this than I believe I do.

It's interesting to note that you bring up Peter Singer, Stephen. He's a controversial figure, no matter who you ask (with the possible exclusion of Peter Singer). I still don't see how I'm my (non-nervous) body, though. If I were tetraplegic, that wouldn't change who I was. I can lose a finger, a hand, an arm, a leg, a lung, a kidney... pretty much anything that isn't vital or can be replaced; I can even suffer the complete loss of voluntary motor function, which takes place in Locked-In Syndrome - but if I suffer completely local central nervous trauma to certain sections of my brain, that can kill "me" in a very real sense, or change me drastically. I can be kept alive using a cardio-respiratory device if it's that serious, but I'm not necessarily in there wondering when I'll snap out of it (though perhaps I am, it depends on the severity of the injury).

Just because we're programmed to pick up on each other's facial features and physical gestures (slaps on the back aren't humanly universal, but smiles and frowns and such are), that doesn't mean it's not still two brains conversing. You and I are having a conversation right now, with the aid of naught but our fingers and eyes and computers, but I expect there's an intelligent person on the other end, that a brain is somewhere out there gathering data through its eyes and outputting data through its hands, and I suspect you're thinking the same thing.

You can't have a similar conversation with anything else, for instance, let's say, a house plant, but that has got nothing to do with the fact that it doesn't have its photoreceptors arranged into little patches inside fluid-filled orbs covered over with oily lenses. But who cares about eyes? Some people don't have those. What about faces? Masks have faces, but we don't treat them like people unless we expect they have people under them. What else have faces? Dogs and cats do, and we treat them like people too, because they behave that way.

Right now, I don't have a face as far as you're concerned (I know you assume I do, but that's a logical inference based upon the fact that no naturally non-faced entities use computers to our knowledge), but you treat me like a person, and I treat you as one too. If I weren't typing to you, expecting you to be on the other end, with or without a face but able to get the information somehow and return it to me, I wouldn't be treating you as an intelligent agent. You or I could be (in principle) wired in directly, as per The Matrix or Permutation City or some other science fiction paradigm and it wouldn't make a real difference to the way we're communicating right now.

This gets back to what I mentioned in another post about personhood theory - why is it appropriate to behave empathically towards some things and not others, or to apply different ethical standards when dealing with, for example, a baby and a Fabergé egg? When do we say that something is a person and something isn't? To make a crude example (no, I'm not deliberately taking a swipe at your examples, but they can be thought to be in a sense related), if somebody's head gets blown off (and let's also assume, for the argument to be valid, that this person is nevertheless somehow being kept metabolically alive using intensive life support), why do we suddenly feel it is inappropriate to treat them as people? Why don't we sit and have conversations with them and expect answers? Why don't we wonder what they're thinking in there? Of course we treat people in comas differently, because there's a non-trivial chance of their really being in there (depending on the degree of the trauma), and partially just because they have faces. Why is it obviously inappropriate to kill unconscious people? I think it is because this constitutes an irretrievable loss of that person - not the temporary and non-total lapse of full awareness that constitutes sleep or catatonia. Whether I kill somebody in their sleep or in their waking, the result is still, ultimately, the irretrievable loss of that person. Why is it ethically problematic to render people unconscious? Usually because it's a violation of their free will. Nobody complains about going to sleep during a kidney transplant, but being struck over the head with a large piece of wood is clearly something most people weren't looking forward to.

As I've already pointed out, our brains wire themselves to handle the sensory demands of our bodies. That's key - if we don't get that wiring done, we end up problematic. Agreed; agree with that. But the fact that my brain is the control centre for my body, that doesn't NECESSARILY (sorry for the all caps, I'm not sure how to embolden the text) make me my body any more than a racing driver is a racing car. Drivers get good at driving cars because their brains wire themselves for it in the same way as they wire themselves to deal with the world of lower energy Newtonian mechanics - the playing with blocks and coloured objects, and the splashing in puddles of young children, and the incessant hand waving of infants. Sure, a driver can switch cars, but in principle that's no different from switching bodies, which in a sense we do whenever we undergo an amputation or other form of body altering surgery. Sometimes it doesn't work properly, as mentioned before: V.S. Ramachandran was able to show that if you can trick the eyes into "seeing" two arms freely moving in some people with painful phantom limbs, their brains rather rapidly forget the inappropriate idea that there is still a paralysed or disfigured limb on the end of the shoulder.

The fact that Matthew Nagle, for instance, controls his laptop through wires in his skull rather than through his paralysed hands, that doesn't make him less of a person because of the alleged impossibility of disentangling bodies from brains (though I’m not suggesting that you’re suggesting this).

And besides, you can disentangle, easily, the person from the "body" in even a perceptual sense. There are a class of neurological disorders known as Delusional Misidentification Disorders which affect lucid, non-psychotic individuals, usually after suffering some form of CNS injury such as a stroke, or cranial trauma, or encephalitis, which results in a delusion involving objects, people, or places being misidentified, or non-identified. One example of this is a Capgras syndrome or Capgras delusion, wherein a sufferer believes familiar persons such as friends and family are impostors. It turns out, part of the reason (though not the whole reason) for this is a disconnexion which occurs between the temporal lobes and the limbic system, which results in an ability in the patients (as observed) to recognise faces consciously, but to misassociate the identity of the person with the particular face, causing the sufferer to claim, due to their complete lack of affect for the face in question, that the only possible explanation is that the person is not who they appear to be. There are, of course, other types of delusional misidentification disorders, involving such things as believing one's reflection to be the reflection of a stranger, or believing that people (read here: 'mental identities') have switched bodies with one another. Another disorder (though not technically a misidentification disorder) is prosopagnosia, usually resulting from damage to the fusiform gyrus, that is the ability to emotionally recognise the appropriate people but the inability to consciously pick out, from facial features, who that person happens to be.

I'm just not convinced that personhood is tied to non-nervous parts of the body. Your whole argument seems to be based upon neurotypical perceptual assumptions not shared by all people, all of which can be disrupted or eliminated by direct intervention in the known functions of brain regions.