Science & Technology

Organ transplant patients may inherit traits of the original donor

By T.K. Randall
November 21, 2025 ·  5 comments

Image: Inside My Head (illustrative)
Credit: Andrew Mason / CC BY 2.0 (adapted) For some people with particularly challenging medical conditions, receiving an organ transplant is their only real hope of leading a normal life, and in some cases, even surviving at all.

But with the medical miracle of organ donation and transplantation comes a peculiar side effect that scientists are only now beginning to recognize and understand.

In some cases, donor organ recipients have been found to exhibit notable personality changes that may be consistent with the personality traits of the individual that they received the organ from.

In one case from 2022, after Alison Conklin had received a heart transplant, she gained a sudden aversion to eating meat, despite having no issues with eating it before.

Did she inherit her vegetarianism from her donor ?In recent research, scientists have noted that "bidirectional communication" occurs between the brain and the body's other organs and that this phenomenon seems particularly prevalent in cases where a patient has received a heart transplant.

Conklin's experience after her transplant extended even further still to strange sensations of deja-vu and flashes of memories that were not her own - as if remembering someone else's thoughts.

She couldn't have simply heard about these things either becaue recipients aren't given detailed information about their donors.

According to a recent study, 89% of organ transplant recipients experience these types of phenomena.

Clearly there is something to this, but exactly how it happens and why, remains unclear.

Source: Popular Mechanics | Comments (5)

Tags: Organ Donation