The brain hasn’t always been accepted as the organ of thought. The ancient Egyptians thought the heart was in charge of intelligence and contained the soul, so mummified bodies were preserved with the heart intact, but the brain was removed and discarded.
The Greek scholar Alcmaeon of Croton was among the first to make the case for the brain, in the 5th century BCE, but two centuries later, Aristotle was still arguing that the heart was the centre of intellect.
There’s no rule that says thought has to have a centre at all. Octopuses have about two-thirds of their neurons distributed among their tentacles. This means that each arm can react to stimuli and move in a semi-independent way.
Then there are the recent developments with AI models, such as ChatGPT, that have produced behaviour that looks a lot like conscious thought, with no physical sensory organs involved at all.
Modern neuroscience and medical imaging have now determined that in humans at least, perception, thought and language are all controlled and coordinated by the brain. But what we think with is not quite the same as where we think from.
The Western idea that consciousness originates in our heads is subjective and depends on culture and religion, too. Many indigenous cultures see consciousness as connected to a spirit or ancestral realm, separate from the body.
There are also plenty of physical sensations such as hunger and pain that originate elsewhere in the body, yet we have no problem integrating this information with the thoughts in our head.
If our brains and stomachs had always been the other way around, we might think of the head as simply a collecting point for sensory and food inputs, while conscious thought was, quite naturally, located in the centre of our bodies.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Billy Wilson, via email) 'If my brain was in my stomach, would I 'think from my stomach'?'
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