So i was thinking, when did we find out that the intellect, memory and dreams come from the brain/mind? Did people know it before all this modern science or not?

Thanks.

Probably not--the mind was somewhat mystical in some cultures, and there was disagreement on where it was. The ancient Greeks, I believe, thought the brain was for cooling--after all, with convolutions, it looks like a radiator and so much heat comes out of the head. The heart, however, beat slowly when a person was unconscious and presumably not thinking (not sure how they reasoned about dreaming), but faster when you are awake, and when it stops, it seems you offer no more thoughts. So, the heart was where your thoughts were. I seem to remember some ancient cultures thought it was your throat (after all, that's where your voice comes from).

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I would have thought that people with head injuries (oh, I hit Thog with spear) would have given ancients some idea of the role of at least the head, if not the contents (brain).

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Lol brain cooling, how a lot of people were without science!

The human brain, ca 2% of the body's mass, produces about 25% if its heat.

Cooling is very important.

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Yes, that's true. Some of the ancient Greek physicians drew just this conclusion from their experience "treating" persons who had suffered just such an injury. IIRC, even earlier medical texts from Egypt and Assyria show some appreciation of the notion that the mind resides in the brain. The operation of trepanning may even predate history.

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Hitting someone on the head produces a change in behavior. Did the ancients correlate behavior with mind and did they think of the mind as residing somewhere in the body as we do today?

Aside from all the many ways head/brain injuries can interfere with good
thinking, it is very obvious to me that my conciousness seems to be located
inside my head, above the level of my nose. That may be due entirely to
the placement of the eyes and ears, but the sense of location is very strong.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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It may seem that way when you are sitting idle at a computer contemplating consciousness, vision, and hearing, but otherwise, all throughout the day we probably would find you doing things like turning on the lights to see better, moving in for a closer look, putting on your reading glasses, cupping your hand over your ear, and so on. In typical situations, visual and auditory consciousness don't seem to have a home anywhere, inside or outside the head. In typical life as one goes about it, there are just the things one sees and hears and the fact that one sees and hears them.

It may very well be wrong, but I have wondered if the notion that "this is all taking place in my head" is a modern one. To me, anyway, it seems the default position would be to not even consider the matter, or that the notion that something was taking place somewhere wouldn't be a natural one to the ancients.

I took a quick look at Aristotle's "On the Soul." Keeping in mind that this is an English translation of an ancient language, he attributes the part of us that does the thinking and believing to the soul. He suggests that the thinking part of the soul, or the intellect, is not blended with the body at all and that there is no organ for it (429a24). So, at least in his case from this one snippet, it is hard to say if he locates the intellect anywhere at all.

This is an interesting question, because it's more subtle than it may seem at first glance. I agree with others that the observation of wounded people should have been a clue that consciousness resided in the brain, even for the ancients. Nevertheless...

It's said that the ancient Greeks thought the soul was located in one's torso (the heart? the belly?...) And when the ancient Egyptians mummified a body -- which, so they believed, would regain consciousness in the afterlife -- they also mummified and preserved carefully some organs, like the heart, but the brain they threw away.

Perhaps, though, we should make a careful distinction between the physical location of the mind, and the theological location of the soul, as Joe's latest post suggests.

Descartes may have had something to do with locating consciousness definitively in the brain.

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The Greeks thought that the Brain was a cooling device, to them it was an undifferenciated mass. This was adhered to up until the 18th century in the West.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

The first and second halves of that sentence appear to have no
connection to each other, although both are obviously true. Not
only is the sense of location very strong while I'm sitting at the
computer, idle or otherwise, it is also very strong while I'm turning
on the lights, moving closer, putting on my glasses, cupping my
hand to my ear, talking face-to face with another person, talking
on a phone, walking on a sidewalk, eating, washing dishes, shaving,
driving, riding on a crowded bus, lying in bed with my eyes closed
when it is completely dark and very quiet, or just about any other
situation you might suggest.

The localization is obvious and very strong to me. As I said, that
may result purely from the location of the eyes and ears, but even
if so, the effect is to place the apparent location of conciousness
unambiguously in the head.

Shakespeare knew that a fevered brain can cause hallucinations.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

I am trying to get into the mindsets of the ancients to understand why they might have located consciousness in the heart or the torso. I wonder if our strong feeling that it is taking place in the head is a modern one. Could we consider seeing and hearing as not being located in the head? My point in that post is that in normal circumstances, we don't really think about consciousness at all and especially not its location in the body. If we move our eyes closer to something for a better look, then we, unconsciously at least, believe that what we see is in the environment and that we see it with our eyes. We may position our ear in the direction of a sound. We place our fingers on objects to feel them. Hunger feels to be located in the stomach. Pains seem to be located around the body. Phenomenologically, it is understandable why other cultures might not locate consciousness in the head.

What about emotional feelings? Do those seem to be located in the head? For me, they seem to be located in the torso. Perhaps emotions influenced the location of consciousness for the ancients.

Yes, remember especially the heart, that beats while you're alive and stops when you die, and that races when you're excited. And the lungs, incessantly breathing. In many European languages, the word for "soul" derives from a root that originally meant "breath". In the Bible, God breathes life into the first man.

This could have a prosaic explanation. Maybe it was simply that the brain, which is spongy and has no hard walls, was too difficult to mummify. The ancient Egyptians might have rationalised their inability to preserve the brain by arguing that it was an unimportant organ.

There is also the symbolism in their beliefs about the afterlife. In the Egyptian tradition, the soul of the deceased was taken to the hall of Maat, where the god Anubis would judge whether he or she was worthy of the afterlife. He did this by weighting his heart on a scale against a feather. If the heart was lighter than the feather, then the soul was judged good, and granted the afterlife. But if the heart weighted more than the feather, then the soul was judged wicked, and presumably destroyed.

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