Why does the heart get credit for love?
Have you ever wondered why we say things like “I love you with all my heart?” Why do we draw hearts to show love, buy heart-shaped candy boxes to give our love, say our heart is breaking when love is lost? Hearts don’t think. Hearts aren’t where we choose to love. Hearts don’t “break into pieces either.”
Lindt Truffles Ultimate Heart
Sure we get emotional, but we don’t scientifically credit the heart with love, not now. But people do say that their hearts are hurting, that their hearts are breaking.
Is that silly?
Or would it be sillier to grab your brain when you were in emotional turmoil? To say your brain is breaking into pieces? Who would give a sweetheart a brain-shaped box of candy?
This idea about the heart came from ancient Greece, from Aristotle dissecting animals. About a third of Aristotle’s known writings are on biology. He noticed in chicken embryos that the heart was the first organ to develop, the principle of the body, and that it pumped blood through connected vessels to all the rest of the body. He noted that the heart is in the center of the body and believed it to be there to balance the heat in the body, with all the other organs situated to cool the heart.
He also knew from the physicians of his time that when they operated on the brain it was cold and did not move or respond to touch. It was insensitive. In Aristotle’s physics heat was energy, so he concluded that the heart was the organ of thought, courage and emotion.
We know a lot more about the heart and the brain today. We credit the brain with the sensory processing that gives rise to those human abstracts such as thought, courage and emotion even though the transcendental idea of the heart as the place of love remains.
Maybe there’s something to it.
Maybe they do balance each other out. Maybe they are connected in ways we haven’t discovered.
Some people seem so certain that love is just a matter of chemicals in the brain, that we are close to creating artificial intelligence (we aren’t). But it’s possible that our great, great, great, grandchildren someday will chuckle at the idea that their ancestors felt silly grabbing her heart in pain during times of suffering? Maybe they will know more about the human person than we do and maybe they will understand in new dimensions how the body and the soul are inextricably intertwined.
After all, we all have a first heart beat, and a last, and our hearts tick off time steadily throughout our entire lives, no two moments in our lives exactly the same, no two heartbeats occupying exactly the same time with exactly the same set of circumstances in the world we live in. Something tells my soul that Aristotle’s conclusions may not have been completely mistaken.
Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump…
Nucleus Medical Art, Inc./Getty Images
**This piece is updated from a year ago, and so the first comments reflect that date. I left them.
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Aw, this is great! Happy St. Valentine's Day!
Happy Valentine's Day Leila!
I'm currently putting together a presentation on Theology of the Body for a Young Adult's conference, and I think I'll use a quote or two (with due credit, of course!). Thanks for some insight to share!
Elise
http://www.kissingtheleper.com
Happy Valentine's Day.
It is interesting, the idea that the heart does the thinking. It makes sense, and it's what I would have concluded, if I had Aristotle's information.
A good part of the article is the contract between science then and now. Just as it's silly to believe that the heart is the source of emotions, it's equally silly to think we understand how the brain is the source of emotions, even to the point of explaining it away as chemical processes (do the processes cause the feeling, or simply result from the feeling? No one knows!)
And yes, we are no where near artificial intelligence. And even if we do make artificial intelligence (in my great grandchildren's lifetimes, maybe?) that doesn't mean much about the source of thought and feeling. We can make real intelligence right now. My wife and I have done just that.
Just because we can make something doesn't mean we own it, understand it, or have explained it away. If we make thinking machines, they will likely be just as much of a mystery as thinking people.
It's “contrast” not “contract”… among other things in that post…
Elise, thank you and use anything. You can find more information in the links too, especially Fr. Ashley's. That's awesome you are talking to young adults!
Hi Paul, Sometimes I do wonder what we think we know scientifically right now that 50 years from now we laugh about. There have been lots of things people said could never be done, yet they were.
That comment about you and your wife making real intelligence right now made me smile. Enjoy your Valentine's Day!
Here's another idea that I came across while studying psychology Stacy: The 'heart' shape is thought to have originally represented another part of the female anatomy, and the symbolism of being pierced by cupid's arrow completes the reference to physical passion. Combine this with the passing similarity to our two valved heart and the fact that when one suffers what we call 'heartbreak' many of us really do feel physical pain in the region of our heart, and there you have a logical explanation for this seemingly strange idea. Our ancestors had far less regard for euphemisms!
Actually I think it's rather a shame that Saint Valentine's Day has been hijacked by rampant commercialism. I'm relieved that none of my family take it seriously, unlike some of their friends – such high expectations, so much disappointment!
There is a very large difference between the science of Aristotle's time and the science today. In aristotles time there was not true scientific method which could be used to determine fact from fiction. Rather, all of the science was done through the use of logic with few experiments to back it up. If it made sense in the mind it did not matter how the world worked, as long as one could logic their way through a problem. For this reason, physics at the time suggested that objects flew in right triangle paths instead of in a parabola. A simple experiment of throwing a ball would have disproved this theory, but experiments did not matter so much then. True experimentation and scientific method came about with galileo's experiments upon balls remembering their heights when rolled down and up a ramp (google it). Also, there are chemicals in the brain which can and have been linked to emotions which is why it is possible to find emotion altering drugs on the market now
Anonymous, you raise interesting points.
First, do scientists come to terms with reality through pure deductive thought? Well, they actually kinda do. So you have to be careful. Einstein didn’t perform experiments; he primarily drew the consequences of Maxwell’s equations through the prism of thought experiments. And Maxwell, in turn built his equations from physical models built with ropes and cranks and pullies. And wait, I don’t think Newton was an experimentalist either (except for some really freaky experiments he did on his own eyes to inform his theory of color but I don’t want to put the exact awful image in your head on such a beautiful day as Valentine’s day).
I have long suspected that the whole narrative about the scientific revolution was written as propaganda rather than history. If scientific method is anything, it is intrinsically tailored to the question at hand. There is no monolithic handbook of scientific method. Oh, they’ve tried! And oh how they failed. I think we’re much closer to Aristotle today than we were even 100 years ago. The narrative of empirical science under a unified method just doesn’t seem to hold up when compared to what scientists actually do.
For example, scientists often “throw out the book” when faced with dis-confirming experimental evidence. Einstein is said to have heard about some experiment that seemed to contradict his theory. He dismissed the news, muttering: “something thermal.” I actually heard this story from someone who knew Einstein. The fellow imitated Einstein’s voice and inflection when he told me the story.
Second, you are right that biochemicals are linked to our experience of emotion. But keep in mind that there is a strong link between our conceptual world view and our emotions. Researchers can inject subjects with epinephrine and randomly assign them to varying situations. The subjects report an emotion that is congruent with the situation. The chemical, epinephrine, does not uniquely determine the emotion. Put them in the middle of a conflict and they feel hostile. Put them in the stands of a football game, they feel excited. Put the man next to a woman, they feel amorous.
That’s why people often experience radical psychological transformation when they have a religious conversion. All of their bodily sensations filter through their new and different conceptual schemata, presumably grounded in neural pathways, yielding radically new emotions. What was once unbearable pain becomes joyful sharing in the sorrow of Mary, and what was once destructive perfectionism becomes a zeal to love, ever more perfectly.
Head and heart are mysteriously joined. We definitely need both.
I know when I am heartbroken, I feel a physical pain in my chest.