Hood, Bruce - Supersense

At one point, there seemed to be some scientific evidence for such a bizarre notion. James McConnell is a controversial figure in the science community. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was conducting experiments on simple worms to measure how long it took them to learn a maze. 22Having trained a bunch of these flatworms to slither around the maze, he then did something very unusual. He chopped the trained worms up into small pieces and fed them to untrained worms. These cannibal worms now learned to slither around the maze faster compared to other worms that had not been fed the cannibal diet.

Further studies with rodents seemed to suggest that naive animals fed the bodies of trained animals learn to run mazes more quickly. 23How could this be if it was not cellular memory? It turns out that the training involved stressing the animal with electric shocks so that it would avoid repeating mistakes in the maze. Remember John Watson and Little Albert and conditioning behaviour? This kind of stress releases hormones that stay in the body. It’s one of the reasons slaughterhouses try to reduce the stress of livestock, because the changes associated with stress affect the quality of the meat. When the hearts and livers of trained mice were fed to novice mice, it produced a measurable difference in the latter’s performance in learning to avoid shock. Was this evidence of memory transfer? No. If mice that had never been trained on the maze were simply stressed by being rolled around in a jar and then killed and fed to other novice mice, these novice mice also showed improved learning on the maze. 24It was not a memory that was imbibed, but a hormonally enriched heart or liver. As happens when you pop a pep pill to study for a test, you learn much faster if you are more aroused. No reputable scientist does this kind of research today. Still, this has not stopped the spread of the cellular memory hypothesis, which can still be found in school science textbooks.

One has to question the logic that motivated James McConnell to do such a bizarre experiment, but clearly he felt that knowledge could be transferred by ingesting the body of another. Like many examples of pseudoscience, it is difficult to make the distinction here between natural and supernatural reasoning, since McConnell’s hypothesis had surface credibility. Eating a trained animal made a difference on a memory task, so why not cellular memory? This line of research is now discredited by the scientific community but still cited as evidence for transplanted memories by those who believe in supernatural connectedness. Some case studies seem to stretch the bounds of credibility. 25However inexplicable Ian and Lynda Gammons’s experiences may seem, they do not seem beyond coincidence or reason. More difficult to explain away are cases such as the little eight-year-old girl who received the heart of a murdered ten-year-old. It was claimed that she started to experience terrifying nightmares and was eventually able to provide a detailed description of the man who killed her donor, enabling the police to capture and convict the murderer.

Such stories are myths that perpetuate supernatural beliefs. Relatives, patients, and those considering organ transplantation must be influenced by intuitive essentialism. This explains why there is a willingness to believe that we can inherit the psychological properties of another person through their organs. While it may be comforting to the families of donors to think that some essence of their loved one lives on, it may even have a negative effect when it comes to organ donation. Eternal essence may be a comforting notion to some relatives, but it may persuade others not to give consent in the belief that the relative still lives on in another. And what about recipients? How do they psychologically adjust to having someone else’s organs inside them? In one case, a British teenager was forcibly given a heart transplant against her will because she feared that she would be ‘different’ with someone else’s heart. 26She was more frightened of losing her own unique identity than by the prospect of certain death. Such is the power of essentialist beliefs.

The Swedish researcher Margareta Sanner has been asking people what they think about organ transplantation and getting some very interesting responses. 27She found that moral contagion was a major factor (‘what if it comes from a sinful man?’), as were concerns about xenotransplantation – the substitution of animal organs for human ones. When offered a choice of different organs, adults typically responded, ‘The liver and kidney from a pig is okay, but I would only accept a human heart’, or, ‘Everything is in the heart; I neither want to give it nor take it.’ One participant even thought that ‘I would perhaps look more piggish with a pig’s kidney.’

We recently examined these sorts of beliefs in healthy students by asking them to rate the faces of twenty people for how attractive and how intelligent they looked and then for how happy the students thought they would be, if they were dying from cardiac failure, to receive a transplanted heart from each person. 28Having initially rated the face of each potential donor on all these measures, we then told them that half the people in the pictures were convicted murderers and the other half worked as volunteers. They were then asked to repeat the ratings for attractiveness, intelligence, and willingness to receive the person’s donated heart. Not surprisingly, though all the ratings for murderers dropped, the biggest effect was on participants’ unwillingness to receive a heart transplant from a murderer. The participants may have thought that the evil of a murderer is a tangible property that can be stored and transferred in a simple pump of muscular tissue.

And what about bigotry and racism? In 1998 Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, was severely criticized for accepting the organs of a donor on the condition that they could only be transplanted into a white patient. 29Following a similar case in which the family refused to allow the organs of a dead man to be transplanted into a nonwhite patient, the state of Florida passed a law banning such restrictions on organ donation. 30

One of Sanner’s most intriguing findings arose from her interviews with patients who had received a kidney transplant from a living donor compared to those who had received a kidney from a dead donor. 31Unlike Ian and Lynda Gammons, the patients with an organ from a living donor were much less concerned about incorporating aspects of the donor’s personality than were patients who had received a kidney from a dead donor. Maybe the recipients of living donors were better prepared (these operations are planned well in advance) and knew the donor was still alive and well and in full possession of his or her unique identity. But the recipients of an organ from a dead donor knew that the person was no longer around and wondered if part of that person lived on inside them.

Clearly, psychological essentialism influences the way we think: as a donor, we may continue to live on in another person’s body or, as a recipient, we may be changed by having another person inside of us. Such supernaturalism can even be found in that most common preoccupation of human behaviour: sex.

ESSENTIAL SEX

If you are male and over forty, you will understand why one of the first movies that had an enduring impact on me was Roger Vadim’s 1968 Barbarella . 32The opening sequence of Jane Fonda’s weightless striptease aroused strange feelings in most prepubescent boys like myself, but it was a sequence much later in the movie that left the biggest impression on me. On arriving on an evil planet, our heroine enters the palace of pleasures, where Amazonian women are sitting around on big cushions smoking from a giant hookah pipe. Inside the glass bowl swims a young man. The women are clearly high on the intoxicating smoke. When Barbarella asks what they are smoking, the answer is chilling. ‘Essence of man’ comes the reply. For a boy on the boundaries of sexual awareness, this was a terrifying revelation. Was sex all about having one’s essence absorbed?