Anyways, there is a reason why I posted the above quote. Apparently by 1596 (when the play was written), they knew the brain was the seat of the consciousness.
My question is, when and how did they finally discover this?
I know the ancients apparently believed the mind was to be found all over the body. The emotions were in the heart (we still say, someone has a ‘broken heart’ for this reason). I think the liver was responsible for sadness, or something like that (hence the term ‘melancholia’). And really it does make a lot of sense. The body is the person. So why wouldn’t the mind be found all over it?
But again, my question is, who first realized the brain was the mind? And when? And while we’re at it, really how did they realize this?
I’d expect that in a coarse way this was understood many thousands of years ago.
Butchering animals would show that the skull contains a large organ. Observing the effect of blows to the heads of humans would show that these affect consciousness in ways that similar damage to other parts of the body does not.
Exactly what Xema says. The real question is how anyone (Aristotle) could come to the conclusion that the brain is not where consciousness and thinking happen.
Seeing as my thoughts form and are located in the area behind my eyes then it is hardly a huge leap to conclude the big squishy mass might be involved somehow.
This is actually cultural! If you were raised in a culture where the heart was thought to be the organ of thinking, you’d be imagining all your thinking as taking place there.
(Plus you’d be much more aware of your heart racing and such and how that ties to what you are currently thinking.)
Perhaps, but the question was about when people started to think this and seeing as we have the ability to correctly locate thoughts, images and emotion right behind our eyes (absent of cultural misconceptions) then it is liklely to be a concept that occurred to people throughout antiquity.
What’s the evidence that we have the ability to correctly locate thoughts, images and emotion right behind our eyes, absent of cultural misconceptions?
Many cultures locate emotions, at least, in the heart or in the guts. Our own did, sufficiently recently that the English language is still strongly marked by this. So I await evidence that the default is to locate them behind the eyes.
Images, right enough, we may link with the eyes because, duh, loss of eyes results in blindness. Thooughts? I see no evidence for that.
I do it. Therefore it can be done. I have no doubt that in history humans that weren’t culturally conditioned otherwise had the ability to do the same.
You did it under the influence of cultural conceptions, surely? What makes you think that people not exposed to your cultural conceptions would also do it?
I don’t know, how can I know? who remembers their first conscious thought and where we instinctively located it? Our culture correctly reinforces that the location of thought is the brain.
I think it pretty much a certainty that other people in antiquity will have located their thoughts and their “self” in their head without cultural pressure to do otherwise.
The only other option is that none of them did so and they all considered areas of the body for locating it but never the head which I find extremely unlikely, especially given that we have our key primary sense organs located right next to the brain.
The brain’s function was considered to be cooling the blood. The seat of consciousness was considered to be in the organs of the torso. The idea of consciousness being in the brain would have been as alien as you find the concept of consciousness being in the gut.
It was certainly known to the Jews of the Talmudic era (c 200-450 CE). In one Talmudic statement, a rabbi says, after hearing the argument of another, “It seems to me he has no brain in his skull.”
I don’t see on what grounds you assert this, you think no ancient people located consciousness in the head? I find that an extravagant claim and one at odds with some of the ancient people and texts mentioned here in this thread.
I would also think as soon as humans started bashing each other with heavy objects (a few million years before 2001, perhaps) they realized that the head was fragile and contained a very important organ for life. People could be stabbed or bashed all over the body and tended not to die instantly, but serious damage to the brain and the person lost consciousness immediately.
This reminds me of previous threads about “when did people realize sex leads to pregnancy?” Old-timey people were not as dumb as we are, they had plenty of time to contemplate the mysteries of life without smartphones and video games to distract them. They figured out there were five other (visible) plants and they figured out their motions. When’s the last time you noticed anything other than the moon moving in the sky? (For me, it was the ISS zipping over in a few minutes).
And yet, in one of the greatest of ancient empires, the Egyptians were very careful to preserve the heart in mummies but scooped the brain out and threw it away as useless gunk.
