Comment by cortesoft
1 year ago
> I "thought" and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips.
This makes so much sense… I always find it interesting that I think of “me” as being mostly my head, and I figure that is probably because that is where my eyes and ears are.
If I didn’t see or hear, it makes sense that my fingers would be what I think of as me.
I think much of it may be just that you're adapting to your culture. I'm not convinced there would be a strong head-bias unless we knew that's where the brain is.
The gut is a good contender for other locations of "me". It's where we feel a lot of our feelings.
When embalming bodies for the afterlife, Ancient Egyptians discarded the brain, but preserved many other organs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excerebration
We feel things in our gut?
I know the saying "gut feeling", but I thought it was just a saying.
It's to an extent just a saying, probably based on it often feeling like that, in that the physical sensations of some feelings are linked to parts of the body.
But specifically with respect to the gut, the gut has a huge number of nerve cells that act like reward neurons, can directly trigger changes to hormone levels, and has a very substantial direct connection to the brain (the vagus nerve), so it's reasonable to say that we do genuinely have "gut feelings".
https://www.science.org/content/article/your-gut-directly-co...
I'm going to chime in to say something I didn't see anyone else mention, which is that your gut has neurons and it probably can make decisions, aka gut feelings.
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/your-gut-second-brain
There are some cultures/languages in which their word for what most English speakers use "heart" for (as in, source of emotion) is instead the same as their word for "stomach". I want to say this was in Papua New Guinea but I can't remember for sure.
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Some primary feelings are more pronounced in hands and feet (anger), others in face (interest) but many express themselves strongly in the gut (surprise, happiness, disgust, fear).
In my culture we are often not taught to pay attention to our feelings (especially men, I suppose) so it's easy to miss these cues. I certainly didn't notice until I had some training in it.
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We definitely can. If you go on an elevator and it starts descending you should definitely feel that.
Anxiety has a strong effect on one's gut, of that I am certain.
good example would be: butterflies in your stomach
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I understood that people in pre modern times thought of the "me" as the heart. I'm not sure if that meant they thought this was where thinking occurred but where the emotions lived I imagine.
Or it is simply an observation that when the heart stops, the body ceases to be conscious. The functioning of the brain was not visible without modern tools.
Even further, the early greeks thought that it's your lungs / chest / breath which is life.
Alcmaeon of Croton identified the brain as the seat of thought as early as the 5th century BCE.
Maybe this came from being hungry a lot.