When all decisions/emotions/attractions/thoughts etc. originate form the brain, why do people use “heart” in such contexts?
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*Tl;dr: You feel emotions in your chest—heartbreak, excitement, happiness, breathlessness—and, in eras before modern anatomy, that made it pretty clear that the area had something to do with emotion. Since emotion is closely related to thought, it was pretty reasonable to presume that it had something to do with thought, too, to the point that vastly separate languages, like Chinese and Nahuatl, all make use of the metaphor. Once we figured out that it had to do with the brain, our figures of speech and cultural imagery had been around for so long that all it meant was they became non-literal, that’s all.*
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Imagine you know nothing about anatomy beyond the obvious (you have two arms, two legs, food goes in mouth, etc.). You won’t know that emotion comes from the brain. (And even that’s not quite accurate.)
What you will know is that certain things happen to your body when you feel emotion. When you’re excited, you feel a flutter in your chest; when you’re heartbroken, you can literally feel an ache in your chest; when you’re disappointed, there’s a sinking feeling.
There’s a physiological reason for all of this. As animals, we react to potential threats and stimuli in a way that assists survival and reproduction. There are two main ways we do this: the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) responses. If we’re threatened, our body mobilizes to prepare to either fight the threat or flee it; if we’re safe, our body takes the opportunity to digest nutrients and rest.
The actual functioning of all these things is incredibly complex, but one of the key requirements of all of them are changes in blood flow. When we’re threatened, we require increased oxygenation and glucose and other things to fuel our response. When we’re resting, our blood flow slows and redirects.
We feel all of this. Our heart speeds up, it pounds in our chest. We need more oxygen than we’re getting at the moment, so we feel short of breath, maybe even tight in the chest. We can feel our heart settle in our chest when we calm down, an easiness in our heartbeat when we become calm.
All of this is to say that, given these physiological realities, it’s very reasonable to presume that your emotion has *some* seat in your chest, because that’s where you tend to feel it. And what’s more, everyone feels it—it’s pretty universal. It enters your poetry, your art, your literature, your idioms. Everyone knows what you mean by it because they’ve felt it. And so we have, for instance, the Chinese 心 (xīn), which is often translated as “heart,” but carries implications of thought and the mind—take, for instance, the line in The Mencius: “心之官則思” or “the job of the Heart is to think.” Across entire oceans we also have, for instance, the Nahuatl (Aztec) *yollohtli*, also “heart,” but again indicative of more: *yollalia*, “to console,” is literally yollohtli-tlalia or “to lay down one’s heart,” to faint is “yolmiqui,” “to suffer of the heart,” and to think is “yolpehpena,” or “to pick from one’s heart.” In point of fact, Nahuatl is rather disrespectful to brains, terming them “cuatextli,” meaning something like “head-dough.” (Similarly, “skull” is “tzontecomatl,” or “a hair-jar.”)
It’s probably only a slight exaggeration to say that it’s a universal metaphor. I’m sure there are languages and cultures that use some other one, but we really do see the idea that the heart (or chest) is the seat of the mind and emotion in many, many places.
That doesn’t really change once you realize, centuries later, that actually emotion comes from complex chemical and electrical reactions centered on the brain. Your culture has probably had the phrases for years—once you know of the brain’s role, they just become non-literal.
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