Ancient Greeks believed the heart controlled reason, emotion and thoughts. Egyptians believed the heart contained the soul’s essence and decided one’s fate. Physiological responses to emotions are felt in organs other than the brain, such as the heart, which is associated with love.
For many modern people, it’s hard to understand why you would love from the heart, when we’re taught from early childhood that the brain is where our essence seems to reside. As with many common beliefs, a better understanding requires looking back through history to ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks believed the heart was the seat of everything, in much the same way that most modern people believe the brain is central to what makes people themselves. Aristotle taught that the heart controlled all reason, emotion and even everyday thoughts.
From Aristotle, he handed down to the Romans the teaching of the heart as a place of emotions. The physician Galen, who laid the foundation for much of subsequent medicine in the West, had a whole theory of the circulatory system. In this theory, the heart was said to be where emotions occur, while rational thought took place in the brain and passions originated in the liver.
The Egyptians also placed great importance on the heart as an organ, and many of them probably also understood what it meant to love from the heart. In Egyptian mythology, the heart was said to contain some vital essence of the soul, such that at death it was weighed against a feather to decide whether a person would go to heaven.
Most modern people have been taught that the brain is where everything happens, so it’s hard to imagine, in a literal sense, that the heart is connected to love. However, most emotions are associated with other organs in common speech. People get butterflies in their stomach when they’re nervous, they feel something in their intestines, and a deep pain rips the heart out of the breast. This all makes sense, when you look a little deeper into physiological responses to emotions and the fact that people perceive them most acutely in organs other than the brain.
Indeed, to understand love from the heart, one need look no further than the basic physiology that most people have likely personally experienced and upon which the Greeks themselves probably based their beliefs. The state of arousal, a state definitely connected to both love and sexual attraction, is felt primarily in the heart. As the body prepares for something exciting, the heart rate increases to increase blood flow throughout the body. This rapid heartbeat, more so than any thought that might race through your brain or rumble in your stomach, is probably what has forever associated that organ as the organ of love.
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