Emotions in Bodies
By Mark Ragins MD
Most of us would say that our emotions are not in our bodies; they’re in our heads. After all, aren’t emotions the products of our brain’s actions? Don’t we even know that some areas of the brain, like the amygdala, are responsible for emotions? Emotions are a function of our mind and our mind is produced by our brain, so our emotions must be in our brain. Right?
Not every society has been as “brain-centric” as we are. In ancient Egypt when they mummified someone, they carefully put their liver and kidney and heart and lungs in special jars, but they tossed out the brains like a few pounds of useless goo. How can that be? Didn’t they know that the brain is the most important part of the body, it’s where our personality, our sense of self, everything really important is, isn’t it? But, before we decide they’re idiots, let’s stop and consider that maybe they lived in their heads a lot less than we do and lived in their bodies a lot more than we do. After all, most of them didn’t read and write, they didn’t go to school for years and years, they weren’t overloaded with information from mass media and the internet, they didn’t walk around connected to computer-phones. On the other hand, just making dinner was probably a significant physical task – what with gathering wood for a fire, and water from a river or well, killing a chicken, and baking the bread. Let alone the physical work it took to grow the wheat and to build pyramids in their spare time. Maybe they were more in touch with their bodies than their brains.
