it's weird that aristotle thought the brain was for cooling blood or whatever. and the ancient egyptians threw the brain out instead of sealing it somewhere special.
was it not obvious that the brain was important? if they could dissect this well, wouldn't they notice the spine, and all the myriad nerves running through the body?
would they not notice the optic nerves? wouldn't they think 'hey our eyes are connected to this big gray thing maybe that means something'
wouldn't they naturally notice that the seat of their thoughts is their head? don't they hear things in their skulls?
did they feel their thoughts in their chests instead?
am i weird for feeling my thoughts as taking up a physical location inside my skull even though that feels like the most natural and reasonable way to experience a thought?
have we been prompted by the past 500 or so years of medical science teaching us the power of the brain to associate head with thoughts?
is it just me that's weird on this and most people don't physically feel their thoughts bouncing around at all?
...could i teach myself to experience my thoughts in a space outside my head? could i make thoughts live in my entire body? outside of my body?
Ok but they also saw all the blood vessels converging in the heart. And they new if your blood leaks out, you die. Nothing leaks out of the nerves (as far as they knew)
But you do raise an interesting point. I also "feel" like my thoughts occupy a physical space inside my head. I wonder how much of that is conditioning?
Because I feel some emotions in my chest, but the brain is the one that's in charge of those, too
I feel like "everything emanates from the brain" is an easy trap to fall into, if the rest of your body is working just fine. After a few decades experiencing weird stuff like "rotating my arm a certain way makes muscles in my foot spasm" and "my mood changes dramatically based on what's going on in my damaged GI tract" I've arrived at a much more full-body perspective.
AFAIK recent medical science knows this too. Your brain sends signals to other parts of your body, but your body also sends signals back to the brain, and parts of your body send signals to each other. Those signals aren't all of the same kind, but there is communication happening in every direction, via multiple means. I'd say your conscious experience isn't so much centered in the brain as it arises from that back-and-forth communication between all the different parts of you. If you were literally a brain in a vat, without your body's signals being simulated in that vat, you'd feel very different, and after long enough your brain would become dramatically different. Your sense of self isn't just the presence of a brain, it's the structure of that brain, and the structure of any brain is shaped by inputs.
I'm pretty sure that, like a lot of common misconceptions, the 100% brain-centric view is from a previous era and culture hasn't internalized contemporary findings of how the body works. Kind of like how people still learn about electrons orbiting the nucleus like little planets. Sometimes it's a useful fiction, other times not useful at all. (And medical/scientific professionals are also brought up with culture formed around old ideas; if you've had to deal with doctors a lot because of a poorly-understood chronic illness you probably know this all too well)
clearly a lot of damage has been done by sloppy and fallacious equations of how organic beings think and the operations of computer hardware, where there's a much sharper physical distinction between the "soft", volatile aspects of computing (the flow of electric current) and the "hard", solid materials that sustain them. in organic bodies there's a mushier distinction between active transport of neurochemicals, which enables relatively speedy communication, and passive transport through slow diffusion, but can you really say there's any clear distinction between the "hard" and "soft" parts of an organic being? but I would hazard to guess that a lot of people think that their brain is somehow the same as a microprocessor, with high-speed (and high-IQ) electrons constantly whizzing around and calculating at top speed, when the physical reality is slower and gooier. ~Chara
