Humans have linked emotions to the same body parts for 3,000 years

Have you ever ever felt like there became a pit for your stomach? What a couple of flutter for your heart?

Apparently the anatomical connections we make with certain emotions and feelings — what researchers call embodied emotions — may even be more universal than you’d think. Essentially, people have been making very similar statements about their bodies for roughly three,000 years.

In a new in finding out about published in iScience, researchers catalogued words for body parts and emotions utilized by folks who lived in Mesopotamia between 934 and 612 BCE, in what's now a region that features Egypt, Iraq, and Türkiye. Then, they in comparison those ancient ideas etched on clay tablets and other artifacts to commonly used up to date-day links between emotions and body parts, using bodily maps to imagine the similarities and differences.

“We see certain body areas which is most likely still utilized in similar contexts in up to date times,” says Juha Lahnakoski, lead author of the in finding out about and a cognitive neuroscientist at Germany’s LVR Health facility Düsseldorf, in an email. “As an illustration, the heart became often mentioned together with positive emotions similar to love, pride, and happiness, as we should say ‘my heart swelled’ with joy or pride.”

These ancients, who lived contained within the Neo-Assyrian Empire, also tended to associate the stomach with feelings of sadness and distress.

No longer the ultimate lot has carried over from the past. As an illustration, the Neo-Assyrians saw anger as emanating from their legs. In every other example, they strongly associated positive emotions, similar to happiness, with the liver.

“This association is largely lost in our current language, nonetheless it truly is going to now now not be such a surprise to folks who are privy to ancient cultures,” says Lahnakoski. “The liver became in actuality considered as the seat of the soul in some ancient cultures, maybe because of its striking size and appearance when having a look into an animal or a human body.”

At the present time, it’s challenging to parse where certain emotional associations originate or how they'll bleed from one population into every other, through shared texts, religions, or cultural practices. But by having a look so deeply into the past to a society divorced from our own by thousands of years, the researchers were in a position to reveal an “interesting” amount of correspondence, says Lahnakoski.

Embodied emotions seem “so obviously natural the manner we describe them now”, says Lahnakoski, but “we may omit now we have grown up in a specific language and cultural environment that could maybe have shaped the very feelings we experience.”
Attempting to hunt down to the past, says Lahnakoski, we can better evaluate which connections are deeply rooted and which, like happiness contained within the liver, have gone by the wayside.