How did we realise the mind is in the brain?
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So, like, am I alone in feeling that my consciousness resides in my skull?
It came from observing changes in personality following head injury. Phineas Gage from the 1800s is the classical example. He had an iron rod go through his head while working on a railroad. He survived but his personality changed dramatically (he was no longer polite and inhibited as he was before, the accounts don’t seem to go into detail but the observers were clearly shocked by what they saw).
I don’t know why a bunch of mind-body dualists come to a thread asking a question framed under mind-body materialism to give their spiritually motivated answers that are entirely irrelevant to the question asked. Proselytize elsewhere?
When u are thinking a thought, do you feel the thought forms in your head or in other parts of your body? For me at least, I imagined myself having the thoughts coming through from my head… Perhaps I was brainwashed into learning that the brain is in my skull, therefore the thought comes from there? Hence my preconceived notion?
In the old times people died a lot more than they do today, and many had various accidents. From the way people died or the way they were affected by accidents they were able to roughly deduce the role of each of our organs and what they do and how they affect us. Doctors did exist and they did examine patients post mortem as well as attempt surgery, with varying results. Also the same applied to animals, and people were able to understand that animals such as deer or livestock had the same organs as us so this allowed for further observation and experimentation.
Overall while there may have been several misconceptions and mysteries throughout history a surprising amount was understood about our bodies. Figuring out that the brain in particular is the center of thought and sense of self is relatively easy since they could easily observe how injury to the brain or other ailments like tumors could affect one’s faculties.
A lot of brain science these days is basically “turn off this part of the brain, see what happens.” We’ve gotten good at it and can usually guess the outcome, but at the core that is the usual idea. There is a drastic impact on people’s ability to think, visualize, and a whole bunch of other “mind- related” tasks when we turn off brain areas or physically remove them so that is why the current assumption is that it’s in the brain.
Brain injuries, which have been with us as long as we’ve been a species. An interesting and surprising exception is Aristotle, who basically thought the brain was a radiator.
By seeing what happens when you poke it (sometimes quite violently, not always intentionally)
Well typically when people took a large rock or arrow to the head their mind stopped working but if they took one to the leg or arm it didn’t. Probably didn’t take long to put 2 and 2 together.
Because you can transplant any other body part including the human heart and still be yourself. A brain transplant is impossible so the mind lives there!!!
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