Are You Ruled By Your Heart Or Your Brain?
The Egyptians believed that the heart, not the brain, was the source of human wisdom, memory, personality, our soul, and emotions. Any reference today to the heart in regard to love, or any other emotion, for that matter, is a reference back to ancient Egyptian beliefs. According to the Egyptians, the gods spoke to man through his heart, which delivered blood, air, tears, mucus, and bodily waste through channels coming from and returning to, the heart. Notions of physiology and disease all stemmed from the heart, although blood circulation was not exactly or precisely understood.
This made the heart the most important organ of the body, explaining why it was not removed from the body during embalming.
The brain was, well, useless, and was yanked out through the nasal cavity and discarded.
Neuroscience explains why the Egyptians no longer rule: weird beliefs. Bodily waste through the heart? I don’t think so.
The Egyptians were not alone. Aristotle downplayed the brain, and Galen believed that the brain regulated movement and speech. The fluid filled ventricles inside the brain did most of the work, according to Galen. So much for a famous anatomist.
We now know that the brain rules. So why don’t we take better care of it? It needs attention.
Think of your brain as a muscle that atrophies with disuse, but grows stronger with use. About 80% of your cranium (your skull) is filled with brain matter; the other 20% is blood and cerebrospinal fluid. Blood feeds and oxygenates the brain, cerebrospinal fluid buffers neural tissue, protecting it from injury.
If you smack your skull playing full contact sports like football or boxing, falling off your bike, or banging into a door by mistake, shouldn’t you be concerned that you might injure your brain?
And the answer to that is….yes, you should be concerned because you have probably injured your brain. Which explains the need for oh-so-attractive helmets.
Ever notice how, when you are learning something new, or studying hard, you get hungry and tired? Even though your brain only weighs about 3 pounds, or less than 2% of body weight, it consumes 20% of the oxygen in your blood, and a whopping 25% of fuel (glucose in the bloodstream), according to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. There’s a word………..
Your brain never stops forming new neural connections. Science used to believe that once adulthood was reached, the brain would no longer grow. Well, they were wrong. We know, from neuroscience, that the brain is plastic. It changes with new input and forms new neural connections until the day we drop dead.
Which means that we need to keep our brain engaged so that it functions properly until we die. Otherwise, like a muscle, it will atrophy. And may help to explain the onset of Alzheimer’s and other dementia’s.
Who needs that?