Have you ever felt like there was a pit in your stomach? What about a heartbeat?
It turns out that the anatomical connections we make to certain emotions and feelings—what researchers call embodied emotions—may be more universal than you think. In fact, people have been making very similar statements about their bodies for about 3,000 years.
In a new study published in Scienceresearchers cataloged words for body parts and emotions used by people who lived in Mesopotamia between 934 and 612 BCE, in what is now a region that includes Egypt, Iraq and Turkey. They then compared those ancient ideas inscribed on clay tablets and other objects with commonly used modern-day associations between emotions and body parts, using body maps to visualize similarities and differences.
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Happiness: Have you ever felt happiness in your… liver? The Mesopotamians did, as you can see by the bright orange dot in this heat map, highlighting body parts frequently mentioned along with emotions in ancient (right) and modern (left) sources. Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024 -
Love: The ancients (right) saw love as coming from one’s liver, knees and heart, the latter matching nicely with how we picture the anatomy of love today (left). Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024 -
Anger: In this heat map, you can see how differently the ancient Mesopotamians (right) thought about anger. Writing most often associates anger with the legs and feet, while today (left) we experience emotion in the upper body. Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024
“We see certain areas of the body that are still used in similar contexts in modern times,” says Juha Lahnakoski, the study’s lead author and a cognitive neuroscientist at Germany’s LVR Clinic in Düsseldorf, in an email. “For example, the heart was often mentioned together with positive emotions such as love, pride and happiness, as we can still say ‘my heart swelled’ with joy or pride.”
These ancients, who lived in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, also tended to associate the stomach with feelings of sadness and worry.
Not everything is carried over from the past. For example, the Neo-Assyrians saw anger coming from their feet. In another example, they strongly associated positive emotions, such as happiness, with the liver.
“This association has largely been lost in our current language, but it may not come as much of a surprise to those familiar with ancient cultures,” says Lahnakoski. “The liver was actually considered the seat of the soul in some ancient cultures, perhaps because of its size and striking appearance when viewed from an animal or human body.”
Today, it is difficult to analyze where certain emotional associations originate or how they may flow from one population to another, through shared texts, religions or cultural practices. But by looking so deeply into the past at a society separated from our own by thousands of years, the researchers were able to show an “interesting” amount of correspondence, Lahnakoski says.
Embodied emotions seem “so obviously natural as we describe them now,” says Lahnakoski, but “we can forget that we grew up in a particular linguistic and cultural environment that may have shaped the very feelings we experience.”
By looking back, Lahnakoski says, we can better appreciate which relationships are deeply rooted and which, like happiness in the liver, have fallen by the wayside.
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Image Source : www.sciencenews.org