Why did a heart shape, which looks nothing like a physical heart, become the undisputed symbol for a heart?
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The truth is, the simple and boring answer is correct. The heart shape represents a heart because it _does_ look like a physical heart. I ran anatomy and physiology labs for years, and I’ve dissected more sheep hearts than I care to think about, so I know what I’m talking about from personal experience.
The heart symbol looks about as much like a real heart as a smiley face symbol looks like a human face; it’s a simplified representation of features. When you look at an actual heart that has been cut out of a sheep or cow or whatever in real life, what you see is the two atria at the top, then the heart coming to a point at the bottom. People were quite familiar with animal hearts because they butchered livestock.
Why don’t we in the modern world think heart shapes look like hearts? Well, it’s because most people in the modern world have much less contact with the process of butchery, and much more contact with diagrams of heart anatomy. Our diagrams show a bunch of veins and arteries connected to the heart, but those are cut off when removing it from the body. Our diagrams show two ventricles at the bottom of the heart, but these are not very visibly distinct on a real heart. It’s not so much that the heart symbol doesn’t look like a real, physical heart…rather, it doesn’t look like our _diagrams_ of a real heart.
Now, for a bit of a history lesson: the heart shape goes back thousands of years, but for most of that time it has just been another shape…often associated with plant leaves, which often have a similar shape. This is where the idea that it’s related to silphium comes from. But the association of physical hearts and heart symbols goes back only to the late middle ages, and starts with anatomical depictions in medical illustrations before coming to symbolize love as well due to the late Medieval/Renaissance association of the heart with love. There’s no real evidence that this modern use of the symbol had anything to do with the long-extinct silphium plant.
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