How did the heart become the symbol for love and affection when the brain is responsible for those emotions?
In: Culture
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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