Should I use my Head or my Heart?

It is general knowledge that the brain is the center of functioning in the human body. It controls our actions, thoughts, speech, and emotions. But this was not always the case, as the heart was once thought to be the center of intelligence and was preserved, while the worm like object that was the brain was pulled out and discarded like a moldy sandwich. From around 1550 BC, the Egyptians started recording their funeral practices. They wanted to insure that only the pure and honest were able to join the sun god Ra to fight off Apep, the god of chaos. But to even be considered for this honor of an afterlife you most likely had to be a Pharoah.

Nonetheless, as shown in the Paparyus of Ani, which through hieroglyphics and paintings showed funeral details and made up the famous The Book of the Dead. Now even though we could not decipher the hieroglyphics until about the late 1700s when the Rosetta stone was uncovered, we could guess what was going on based on these images. The boxing glove looking smudge on the left side represents a human heart with a feather on the other side of the scale. The heart was weighed by Anubis, the protector and embalmer of the dead against a feather, representing truth (Thorpe). But the weighing on the heart actually made a little bit of sense if you think about it. “Harden not your hearts” or “heavy heart” are phrases referring to this method that truth made for a lighter hard and jealousy, anger, and sorrow made for a heavy one.

If your heart did not balance out then a crocodile monster called Amenit, the Devouress would eat it and you might have to wish that you’ll come back in the next life as an Alligator, because apparently Alligators can totally take on Crocodiles. But this pretty much meant that you were going to hell, or whatever the Egyptians thought about a bad afterlife. Let’s just say you wouldn’t be dining with the Pharaohs at the table of plenty.

So then, if the heart wasn’t actually the center of intelligence, emotion and the soul, what is? This view was held for at least a thousand years and even Aristotle and Galen defended the heart, but Hippocrates rebutted in about 400 BC with his paper, On the Sacred Disease. Although the disease he described follows more closely with the description of epilepsy, this view that damage to different parts of the brain could control actions such as breathing, was widely rejected.

            Hippocrates describes in On the Sacred Disease:

Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. ... And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us, some by night, and some by day, and dreams and untimely wanderings, and cares that are not suitable, and ignorance of present circumstances.

He refers to several emotions that the brain is responsible for, and that our thoughts about the future, past and present are all contain in this organ. Hippocrates used the anatomy of the brain and the presence of a “sacred disease” to show that the brain was in fact the center of control of the body. Because the disease could affect different parts of the brain, it could affect different parts of the body.

Although initially ignored, since Hippocrates was the father of medicine, soon this view began to take hold and later Descartes in the Renaissance began to defend the importance of the brain (“The History of the Heart”).

Despite our movement towards a Medical Model which found through experimentation and dissection that the brain controlled parts of our body and is essentially our mind and soul, we still attribute emotion to the heart. Now we’ve all heard the phrase, “follow your heart” or “follow your head, not your heart”, depending on who you’re talking to, but why do we consider these both to be sources of decision making? The heart today although scientifically we know that the brain is the central command center, we still attribute hearts to emotion, and therefore emotion-driven decision.

With Valentine’s Day especially, hearts and love are almost seen as one, even though hearts, have nothing to do with love besides pumping blood in order to keep us alive, which we obviously need to be in order to love others. The heart could be connected to love because of its physiological changes when we fall in love. Falling in love or seeing someone we love can trigger our heart to beat faster or “skip a beat”, but again, the brain is what controls all of this.

Works Cited

Hippocrates. On the Sacred Disease. MIT, 1994. The Internet Classics Archive. Web. 5 Feb. 2015.

"A History of the Heart." Early Science Lab. Stanford University, Web. 5 Feb. 2015.

Thorpe, Vanessa. "Book of the Dead: Scroll down and learn how to die like an Ancient Egyptian." The Guardian [New York, NY]. Guardian News, 23 Oct. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2015.