| by Dr. Sripali Vaiamon
( April 8, 2013, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) I contributed an article a few weeks back to Sri Lanka Guardian on ‘ love in heart is a universal lie’. I didn’t get any feedback. Those who perused may not have agreed with my opinion or treated it as just a bundle of jokes. Or it is just humbug as there are thousands of songs and poems by veterans have composed to affirm this aphorism as world accepted truth. As such they may have treated it as an illogical hocus-pocus. Let me galvanize my obsession in a more comprehensive way with logical opinion expressed by world renowned personalities. But prior to that I must say, I felt the earlier title bit too harsh. Therefore I compelled to change the topic as added to this article.
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Today we already know that it is not the heart that is responsible for feeling or emotion, but the brain. The heart does no longer anything to do with these since it does not have a cerebral cotex.Neuroscientists have been studding the brain and have realized that it is the limbic system in our brains that governs our emotions.
First of all I wish to quote a few lyrics of favourite songs, in English as well as that of my mother tongue;
Bee Gees in the ABBA’s 3rd Album- Heart full of soul
Amy Grant -Baby baby - You put my heart in motion
Elvis Presley -One broken heart for sale
The Beatles- Let it be......And when the broken hearted people living
Brittany Spears – trip to your heart....I’ll fly away on a trip to your heart
In my mother tongue-Sinhalese.
C.T –Mee amba vanaye..Sihinen sihineta oba enawa, hadawatha ridumada nawathinawa
Ananda Samarakone –Sri Lanka matha..Obawe apa shakthi, apa hada thula bhkthi
Sunil Santha –Mihikatha nalawala....surathaliye oba hadawatha pathule, pemmal ka sathudho
Premakeerthi de Alwis –Api okkama rajawaru...hada so gini del niwuna
Clarence Wijewardana – Loke jeewathvannatta...hadhawatha degodin senahasa galagiya
What is the sense you derive in the referances to – heart- in these lyrics?
Before you think about it I must express that this sort of adjectives have a poetical sense.What is poetry? Not quite a reality. It goes very often beyond reality. Exaggerations, over emphasis, inflations, extravaganzas, much ado about nothing!
In Sri Lanka we have a great pride to possess the longest history in the world. The Mahawansa. But the early part up to about 250 BC. consists full of myth. Geiger said it is in the Kavya style. That means poetry. As such those may not be realistic. Have transgressed the reality.Just fanciful imaginations minus evidence or hard facts.It seems most of our religious pundits accepted it as plausible facts. So in poetry, lyrics, ballads, elegies very often what they have exposed would be misconceptions. It is somewhat similar to that popular Sinhala song “Sripade Samanola Kanda pene” No one notices the glaring error, but just sings. It ought to be the other way about. Errors engulfed in compositions with the word heart; singers or listeners may not notice but they sing or listen as absolutely perfect truth.
In ancient times there were no tools to investigate the heart or the brain. It is only with the mental power of those who were accepted as intellectuals have arrived as conclusions of any subject. Even religions are concerned. Primitive people believe what they say. So these utterances go on without taking seriously or any investigation. We who live in the 21st century why can’t we think intelligently?
With an apology to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, I borrowed a few conceptions to a question-Do emotion and love really comes from the heart?
The heart shape has been taken as a symbol which is an ideograph used to express the idea of the ‘heart’ in its metaphorical sense.
It further elaborates, the fancier symbol of the heart represents love and it was developed in the 15th century.
The ‘heart’ suit now standard in the French style playing card decks, first approved around 1470.
Different artists have symbolised different shapes of the heart, according to what their imaginations accepted and it gives nothing but artistic creation and no possibility to think that there had been any natural formation .And those were all western conceptions.
Since the 19th century the symbol has often been used on Valentine’s Day. It has depicted with candy boxes, popular cultural artefacts as a symbol of romantic love. In 1870 a Valentine card appeared a ‘RED’ heart .To depicts the deep love. An artist had used the female sex organ similar to the shape of a heart to emphasize deep human love. A Polish coat of arm 1762 had drawn the heart symbol at the centre with decoration right round.Chech Republic in 1966 had drawn the heart in the Episcopal coat of arms. Some artists had drawn with an arrow pierced into it to indicate it Cupid’s arrow as such love has been imbedded.There are so many variations by different artists that had been drawn according to their whims and fancies.
In ancient Egypt basically it was believed that the heart was the organ responsible for feelings and emotion because it was the organ that pump blood throughout the body and that had any visible alteration in the beating when we changed our feeling, if we were happier or anger or sadder or sleepier.
Today we already know that it is not the heart that is responsible for feeling or emotion, but the brain. The heart does no longer anything to do with these since it does not have a cerebral cotex.Neuroscientists have been studding the brain and have realized that it is the limbic system in our brains that governs our emotions. It consists of several parts of the brain working together, the amygdale, the hippocampus, the basal ganglion and the thalamus as well as other parts. Your heart has nothing to do with your feelings and emotions; your brain does. All feelings are located in the brain in temporal region.
MIND is in the brain and it considered a definite object apart from the body and as such virtually synonymous with SOUL. This is also from an early Encyclopedia, but it didn’t impress me. According to Buddhist theory ‘I’ won’t be the same in a moment. It changes. So in a changing entity it is not possible to have a soul. I don’t want to elaborate on this further as I am still not impressed on this term –soul. Do you know definitely what meant by soul? Pardon me! I can’t comprehend.
The most interesting aspect of the ancient Egyptians’ concept of the heart is that their ancient beliefs remain with us today not as science, but within the very fiber of our emotions, our poetry and our song-lyrics.
The early pious believed that the heart, rather than the brain was responsible for human love as well as emotions, memory, soul and the personality itself. Ancient Egyptians were advanced in medical knowledge, but they had no understanding of the heart and its blood circulation. Hence this misconceptions of origination of love and emotions are in the heart may have been cropped up.
According to their ancient belief, the final judgment portrayed by the Book of Dead, the heart of the deceased was shown as being weighed against the father of Ma’at, a symbol of universal truth, harmony and balance. Anubis,a deity was sometimes shown adjusting the balance of the scale in favour of deceased to ensure it into the underworld. The heart was thought to have given back to the deceased in the afterlife.
The heart is one of the most important organs in the entire human body. But it is really nothing more than a pump composed of tubes which pump blood throughout the body, beating approximately 72 to 100 times per minute of our lives. The heart pumps the blood, which carries all the vital materials which help our bodies to function and removes the waste products that we do not need. E.G. The brain requires oxygen and glucose, which if not received continuously will cause it to loose consciousness. Muscles need oxygen, glucose and amino acids as well as the proper ratio of sodium, calclum and potassium in order to contract normally. The gland needs sufficient supplies of raw materials from which to manipulate the specific secretions. If the heart ever ceases to pump bloog it begins to shut down and after a very short period of time, will die.
With reference to the origination of emotion and love in the heart, which raised by Wikipedia, readers have responded and their views are as follows:
If emotion and love came from the heart, people who receive heart transplants would become different people.
-Sorry, I agree with your friend. All thoughts and feelings come from the brain.
-Your friend is right, everyone knows the heart’s function is to pump blood.
-It is a metaphor. All thoughts emotions and feeling come from the brain, though it may feel like your heart telling you what to do.
-I feel everything what we feel and those come from our brain.
-True, it is all chemical reactions in the brain.
If I stress human body in composite is a marvellous creation with minute components in unbelievable precision which nobody can just imagine to have formulated. Even if you consider several days you can’t arrive at a conclusion. Simple answer is it is the creation of the God. If that is the precise conclusion, no further explanation is necessary. It is confirmed.Those who have no belief in the God or gods in various size and shape as structured in several religions, may entrust it to the NATURE.
Who is Nature? Could you define? Could you personify? Whether the human being has been created by a God or has formed by the Nature. Human being is a reality. He is living and nobody could deny. It is a universal truth. Diabolical question is who and how he was originated and living hitherto without any break.
Nature understands no jesting. She is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man-Goethe. However this is only an opinion of world famous literati. But not from a scientist or a physician. Unless it is well analyze and illustrate nobody will accept. In the case of heart it has been well defined, analyzed according to modern science.
Scientists are people of integrity with a healthy knowledge gained through experimentations and profound investigations. They understand what they analyze with modern equipments than most of the philosophers, literati and other laymen who try to gauge most of these obscure matters only through their insights where they have absolutely no technology or proper equipments to judge and as a result they gain vague conclusions .
With the current scientific emphasis on molecular mechanism, old morphological insights become underexposed, since cordial development occurs in an architecturally complex and dynamic fashion , molecular insights can only fully be exploited when placed in a proper morphological context.
When it comes to love or sadness, emotion or any other feeling it will definitely generate in the human body. If you say in the heart, is there any mechanism for such a development. Have you fully studied the organic heart. Let me correctly elaborate it with examples from world renowned experts in the fields of medicine, science, or philosophy.
In the Internet, world accepted opinion has been defined under the human heart and its functions.
The heart is one of the most important organs in the entire human body. But it is really nothing more than a pump.
This is how it has been described in an encyclopedia brought out in 1935:
Heart is a muscular pumping organ of the body and principle instrument in driving the blood to all parts of the body. It is divided into two cavities separated by a wall of muscle. The left cavity pumps blood throughout the body, while the right cavity pumps blood only through the lungs. The blood flows out but is prevented from returning by a series of valves at various openings. Both sides of the heart contract, empty, relax and refill simultaneously. Therefore only one beat is felt. The normal heart has an average beat of 72 strokes per minute, in infants it is120.Young children about 90 per minute. Other than this there is no mechanism to generate human feelings. Love or hate, sadness or joy or any other emotion. It beats faster when it get a mental shock. If there is any other deviation it is because it has received some impulses from the mind, which is in the brain. It is almost like this. Whenever there is a volcanic eruption in an under sea volcano or tsunami due to collision of plates under the sea earth surface will trembl. Because it receives the impact on those eruptions.Heart gets such impulses when mind felt some emotion, or some impect.
According to medical information human heart beats approximately 80,000 to 100,000 per day and pump almost 20,000 gallons of blood. This means that in a person’s life lasting 70 to 90 years the heart beats almost three billion times and pumps 50 to 65 million gallons of blood. In order for the heart to deliver oxygenated blood to all cells pump through arteries. Veins trying deoxygenated blood cells to the lungs, which then are oxygenated and then send back to the heart. In this way a persistent cycle is formed of the heart pumping oxygenated and deoxygenated blood out to their designated destinations and therefore the heart maintains the circulatory system.
What is heart?
In my recent novel, The Therapy (www.iUniverse.com) I illustrated sufficiently how the heart and the brain function in a very simple manner so that an average person could easily understood.Brain is consists with neurons, dendrites and neurotransmitters with which all functions relevant to memory, originating of ideas, feelings such as love, sadness angry and pleasure are taking place and sustain as required. But such mechanisms are absence in the heart other than the valves. But heart,blood,skin and muscles always get the signals from the brain whenever and whatever originated in that supreme machine.
The values of the heart were discussed by a physicion of the Hippocratian School around 4th century BC. although their functions were not fully understood. The Greek physician Galen (5th century BC.) knew blood vessales carry blood and identified venous and arterial blood each with distinct and separate functions.
Plato, the teacher of Aristotle provided some useful insights into the theoretical structure of the human mind, posed largely upon the elegant theory of forms. He used the idea of a psyche, a word used to describe both the mind and the soul, to develop a rough framework of human behaviour reasoning with impulse.
Plato proposed that the human psyche was the seat of all knowledge and that the human mind was imprinted with all of the knowledge it would continuing the law of thought. Aristotle attempted to address the relationship between impulses and urges within the human mind.
According to a famous neurologist, Antonio R.Damasio,joy or sorrow can emerge only after the brain registers physical change in the body.
In an excellent publication on human body, there is a reference to heart which is worthwhile look into. The heart is a living pump , a life-giving pump, a simple machine with a several missions. Its labour is brute, its fabric is coarse, yet the heart connects and sustain the body’s functions. Cardio rhythm allows the brain to think, the lungs to breaths and the muscles to move. The heart is the centre of life. Yet there is no mechanism to originate any emotion, love or feeling. Still our scientis have not fully look into the heart cavity to have a through understanding. There is a threat from religious beliefs. Scared to go against and involve in research. There was a Spanish theologian and a physician, Miguel Servetus, in the 16th century who understood really involved in the breathing of human being. Servetus sought a rational explanation for the Bibiblical passage placing man’s soul in the blood. How he wondered, did the breath of God reach the blood? He published a book on pulmonary circulation. But there were threats to him. He escaped and came to Geneva. He printed some books in France but he concealed his identity. Somehow or other Protestant Reformer John Calvin had come to know this and he ordered to arrest him and burn at the stake by wrapping his books strapped to his waist. As such scientists and physicians were scared to involve in research. It was only in 1930,not even 100 years ago, Physicians, scientists and surgeons fully discovered the heart gradually experimenting on the finding of Miguel Servetus.
The heart itself remained an object of awe.Egyptions devised hieroglyphics that incurred its shape as a vas with handles for the connecting blood vessals.Even older,the Sumerian pictogram for the heart looked like a clam. Later it evolved into a Babylonian word sign resulting a gate with two trumpts.These symbols represented the heart as home of intellects.Scholars of the time would have explained that the heart housed love as well.
In science the most tantalizing yet most forbidding has been the human brain. Knowing the structure of the brain and its innumerable functions depend on the neurotransmitters one can analyze how literati and composers refer to the heart as an object of love directly and indirectly. They should attribute their sentiments to the MIND, in the brain. Not to the pumping station of the human body, the heart! Because some intellectuals may refer to those taken heart as the machine that originate love, just as blind poets. They may have taken what they uttered as artistically but not realistically. Similar to poetry art is also transgressing reality. I’ll quote two precious instances in two of the songs of Dr.Amaradeva and Prof. Sunil Ariyaratna in the next article which will deal on the same theme but on the deliberations of the East with Ayurveda and Chinese medical arena. However I greatly appreciate to have your genuine feedback on this article. Thanks!
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