This actually took record keeping to be certain. Preliterate societies generally didn’t know that the number of planets was only 5 and didn’t track their motions. For example, they usually considered the Morning Star and Evening Star to be two different things, rather than two manifestations of a single planet.
As far as the brain-cooling-the-blood meme, I think that was Aristotle’s idea and not necessarily one shared by others, at least at that time.
How correct is that?
How much of our emotions are affected by our glands, which are located various places in the body?
That’s certainly not the only other option.
Two additional options, entirely off the top of my head:
Some people in antiquity located their thoughts and their “self” in their head; while other people in antiquity didn’t.
Some people in antiquity located various components of their “self” and their thoughts in their head, and other components elsewhere. It’s entirely possible, for instance, to consider that one’s thoughts about what one sees occur in the head, one’s thoughts about sex occur in the sex organs, one’s love for one’s children occur in the heart. (I don’t know whether there’s a specific culture that assigns them that way. I’ve certainly known people to write/talk about them that way.)
Who is saying that? [ETA: Maybe susan is; that isn’t clear to me.]
We have no idea where most ancient people located consciousness, or for that matter how many of them thought of “consciousness” in the same way most modern people do.
What [at least most] people [in the thread] are saying is that we don’t know that all ancient people located consciousness in the head; and there’s at least some evidence that some of them didn’t. That’s an entirely different statement.
That’s a better argument, and I think there’s something in it. I think we probably did figure out pretty much right off that whatever’s in the skull is important.
However, I note that damage to just about any part of the body can cause serious disturbance of thought patterns, if infection and fever results; and sometimes much faster due to shock and/or blood loss. So there would also have been evidence that a hole in one’s chest or abdomen, or for that matter in one’s foot, can mess up one’s consciousness. And some people get hit in the head and don’t lose consciousness; and, while damaging the skull badly enough can cause apparently instant death, so can damaging the heart badly enough; and tearing a major artery open pretty much anywhere comes close.
Ok, now I’m very confused. This is exactly what I’ve been saying.
Are you asking when we got the idea that the brain is the center of emotions, images and thoughts? As I remember, a big leap forward in this came with the case of Phineas Gage, who had an accident in which an iron spike impacted his head and destroyed much of his left frontal lobe. Those who knew him noted personality changes after this.
Oh, okay; I misunderstood you, then.
I think what confused me was your appearing to insist that cultural conditioning has nothing to do with it. Maybe you meant not that cultural conditioning can’t or doesn’t influence what one thinks about where (and if anywhere specific) one’s seat of consciousness is, but only that cultural conditioning wasn’t necessary to come up with the idea in the first place. I think that’s true; but that it’s now impossible to tell whether cultural conditioning is why anybody in this society might feel that their seat of consciousness is in their brain, because we’ve pretty much all been taught that since before we can remember. (Despite which some people still say that they hold their love for their child in their heart, or that a horny man is ‘thinking with his other head’.)
Correct. Cultural conditioning can get you to believe any old bollocks that isn’t necessarily true, religions being the prime example and the concept of thought primarily being located in the organs of the torso is another.
You can, of course, conjure up a strong enough cultural influence to make people believe that but not every ancient people will have thought that way. Even within cultures that do there will be a non-zero amount of people that will give lip service to it but internally will think “that’s bollocks, my thoughts are behind my eyes”. Those people may have been the heretics but they aren’t wrong.
Considering how malleable and variable our minds and perceptions are it is highly unlikely that no-one came to conclusion of brain=self, even against the pressure of the prevailing culture. e.g. I’ve heard people talk about their “internal monologue” and it seems to be the cultural norm but I can’t wrap my head around that. Whatever thoughts happen in my head are not perceived by me as words, I don’t “hear” myself think. Brains are weird.
Since the above has been well covered from the Western perspective, I’d like to add from the Eastern (Indian) perspective.
Atreya was the founder of Indian “school” of medicine known as Ayurveda circa 600 BC. Six sub-schools were founded subsequently by his students. Notable is the anatomy school by Charaka.
But not so well known is the treatise by his colleague Bhela Samhita. The Sanskrit version of the book can be found on the Calcutta University website.
In the book : Encyclopaedia of Indian Medicine: Historical perspective, By Saligrama Krishna Ramachandra Rao (Available on Google Books). Page 40 :
"A view found in this work is rather unique : that mind is lodged in the brain (chittam hrdaya-samsritam). That the expression hrdaya {“heart”) actually means ‘brain’ is borne out by the description of hrdaya found in the work itself. In cases of insanity (unmada), the mind as the faculty of sensations (manas) is first affected, then the intellect (china), and finally the faculty of determination (buddhi). "
One nice thing about Julian Jaynes’ book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is the amount of material he gathered to make his point. (Fun to read … but not exactly a believable idea.)
The quotes he gives from The Iliad really do present the notion that the “mind” was seen as located in the chest. One issue is whether this was “Homer”'s world view or actually those of late Bronze Age people. There’s several centuries of slop there.
But given that even some classical Greek writers believed likewise or something similar suggests it was still a common notion even then.
The point I guess is that between sight and sound, the “me” that most people experience is located in their head. Add to that taste, and it implies most of life experience is in the head; knowing that losing the head causes death probably just reinforces that. Plus head damage that does not kill can cause a person to become a simpleton or catatonic; not hard to infer that’s the seat of consciousness. There is of course the other observation that emotions seemed to be seated in the heart, since it would pound at strong emotions- fear, excitement, etc.
Both weird and highly variable.
I’ve had a running verbal commentary going in my head since I was very small. (When it first started, I was able to turn it off at will; I know this because I remember, very distinctly, the night when I was first not able to. It freaked me out.) It seems to me that all my conscious thought is in the form of words; though I don’t “hear” them in the sense of their seeming to make a sound – I don’t “see” them either, I just think them.
But it also doesn’t seem to me that this is the only form of thought going on within me, or the only form that’s part of my sense of self. There’s also what I think of as “the back of the head”, which is also thinking, but not in words; though often what it’s thinking will eventually work its way through to “the front of the head” which will put it into the form of words so that the conscious part of the mind gets access to it. The back of the head certainly influences what the front is thinking.
And emotions don’t feel to me like they’re located particularly in my head at all – or anywhere else specific; they feel, hard to explain, more like they’re through the whole body? or at least through the head and the torso both.
It reads to me as if you’re assuming that “the “me” that most people experience” excludes the emotional parts of self; and also excludes the senses of touch and proprioception, which while we now know are interpreted in the brain are felt all over the body. I think that a lot of that sense that one’s self is only the rational part (which I tend to think of as “the front of the head”) is actually cultural; and that for many people, at least if it weren’t for the cultural influence and sometimes despite it, the self is a lot larger and less limited than that.
Again this is generally obtained through culture. A whack to a lot of places, e.g., the heart, can cause death or other serious long term problems including mental ones.
You just have to accept that there is absolutely nothing special about picturing that you are internally seeing and hearing stuff within your brain. You are taught that.
Keep in mind that people were astonishingly unconcerned about physical evidence for a long time. That vision was the result of something being emitted from the eyes was believed by many for millennia despite trivial tests to disprove this. Shoot, we still have a ton of people who think the Earth is flat since they sense no motion, can’t understand how people in Australia don’t fall off a globe, etc.
It is special in that all the other options are wrong.