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.
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