[kadoban]

> I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.

Wild. Doesn't necessarily surprise me too much that the body stores some memories outside the brain, but it seems _very_ surprising that another body/brain can read and understand ones created by another. I'd assume that the whole mind and memory system is one big correlated mess, not essentially composed of data files in a ~standard encoding.

[kibwen]

It would be hasty to assume that any memories would be transferable in such a way. If your hypothesis is that transplant recipients can have their memories altered by interpreting information carried by foreign organ cells, start by assuming they're reading junk data that they cannot decipher. Brains are great at turning junk data into something that feels real.

[im3w1l]

I would probably ascribe it to the procedure itself. Like I imagine if you put someone under, opened up their chest, took their heart out and then... put it back in - that the stress of that whole thing would be enough to seriously mess with your head.

[kadoban]

You could probably test that theory. Just compare heart transplants against similarly invasive surgeries and see if the same effects exist.

[kadoban]

That was my followup question, are the memories accurate (even as much as normal memories are), or are they nonsense? Or even better, it'd be fun if they're not completely nonsense, but corrupted in some understandable way (like people/places are substituted for instance). There's no way at all that memories are encoded as essentially mpeg files, so _something_ has to be wrong with them.

But yeah, you're right, odds seem good that they're just nonsense, but even then it just feels weird that the body can even interpret them as memories in the slightest.

[yetihehe]

Maybe it's all about encoding and it IS pretty standard? Brain can decode vision through tongue nerves [1] as long as it looks like vision data and is correlated with head movements. There were experiments with other senses sent through different means or whole new sense (magnetic [2] and echolocation [3]). Looks like brain is so flexible, that anything resembling sensible information will be decoded.

[1] https://news.wisc.edu/a-taste-of-vision-device-translates-fr...

[2] https://blinry.org/compass-belt/

[3] https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/echolocation-in-peo...

[mjan22640]

Rabies virus induces the same behavior across different species (the victims in terminal state are terrified by swallowing liquids).