The Heart Is the Seat of All Emotions

The use of the word heart derives from ancient and nearly universal pre-scientific beliefs among people that the heart is the epicenter of human emotion. We now know this to be untrue, but back in the day, all we knew was that when we got big feels, our heart rhythms would change as a result. These days we know that those emotions originate in our brains and catalyze downstream physiological effects such as how our heart beats. Back then, people just felt their feelings in their chest. So they figured their emotions emanated from the heart, straight from the heart. That is a distinction that would have made no sense at all to the ancient Egyptians who believed the heart was the seat of