How did the heart become the symbol for love and affection when the brain is responsible for those emotions?
In: Culture
We didn’t know much about the brain vs. other organs and their role in our physical health, let alone our consciousness.
You’ve got two options to interpret this, one more romantic than the other but that still holds up and the other an example of our former wrongness!
Optimistically we can say that we use the heart as a symbol of love because it _really does get impacted by love_ and is itself directly impacted by the love in our brains. It beats faster when passionate, it beats slower and more calmly when we’re content and feeling safe and when we are in close cuddly proximity we can experience that in the other, where we cannot directly experience the brain. so…it’s great symbol of love for those reasons, even today!
More cynically, we were just wrong when that came about. We didn’t understand the mechanisms of the brain and lots of organs were associated with body parts (a women is “hysterical” until she has a “Hysterectomy” – aka “hysteria” has a root in the word for the uterus.
I’m gonna go with the first one.
It was a long ass time before we realised what the brain was actually for. Given you can actually feel your own heart beaten, it probably got associated with love thousands of years ago because we could feel it beat faster when we’re with people we love.
The heart shape was used to represent the heart-shaped fruit of the plant Silphium, a plant used as a contraceptive. Ancient Rome used the plant so much for contraception that it went extinct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
Because the brain rarely shows physical side effects in response to emotion. The heart most definitely does, so it was logical, if incorrect, to conclude it has something to do with emotions.
All I know is that fluttery sensation you get with those feelings are physically located in your midsection.
If you’re feeling any sensation around the head, however, you’re most likely having a headache.
The heart is known to feel physical sensations in response to certain emotions. Not just love but also fear, anger, disappointment, and excitement.
It was not an unreasonable belief for pre-scientific societies to assume that emotions are located in the heart. The Ancient Egyptians and the Hebrews believed the heart was where the mind and soul resided. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle agreed with that idea, and dismissed the idea that the brain was where thinking happened.
The Roman physician Galen taught that the emotions came from the heart, reason from the brain, and passions from the *liver*. This sounds bizarre, but part of this comes from the early medical theory of *humorism*, which taught that there’s four basic fluids (“humors”) in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Various types of imbalances in these fluids was believed to produce physical illness as well as attitude traits such as being quick to anger or being depressed. Blood was believed to be produced in the liver.
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