Stiff - Chapters 8 & 9

One of the most interesting parts of this section of reading was towards the end of Chapter 8, when Roach brings up the issue of heart transplant patients being able to sense another being or personality traits of another being in the heart that they received. At first I thought that it would be really intriguing if this actually happened, but the more I read, the more ridiculous it sounded. It seemed that the people who undergo these situations experience a self-fulling prophecy. By that I mean that they are trying so hard to feel someone else residing in their transplanted heart, that they make up these feeling. They don't make them up consciously, but subconsciously they see signs that are not actually there just because they are hoping to see them so badly. This was made clear with the case of the transplant patient who was convinced that his heart came from a young black women, when actually it came from a white male. He made up this whole story behind where his heart came from that turned out to be totally false. It's possible that my hypothesis is completely off and that people sometimes do share their transplanted heart with the soul of the previous owner, but I highly doubt it.