Why Aristotle thought we have a refrigerator in our heads and other fun facts about the brain

Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I?

These are the questions our forefathers asked when they looked at the world around them, trying to understand how the body and mind work, explains Spanish neuroscientist Ignacio Morgado.

These are also the questions that open Materia Gris – La Apasionante Historia del Conocimiento del Cerebro (Grey Massa – The Passionate History of the Knowledge of the Brain, in free translation), the most recent book by the professor of psychobiology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain).

“Assuming that we think with an organ in the body other than the brain is unthinkable for a cultured person today. But the truth is that there is no special sign, sense or feeling that tells us, not even intuitively, that we think with what’s inside our heads”, says the writer when talking about the difficulties of our ancestors in their attempts to solve the unknowns they had about the mind and the body.

Morgado, author of more than a hundred works in psychobiology and neuroscience, exposes in Materia Gris everything we have learned about the brain and mind “and how much we still have to learn”.

But how much do we really know about the brain and why it remains the most complex and mysterious organ in the human body? In this BBC News interview, the neuroscientist gives some answers.

BBC News – Mr. he says in his book that “what is known to us today and seems normal to us, in the past was unknown and mysterious”. Why did it cost us so much to understand what our brain is for?

Ignacio Morgado – This thing we know we think about with the brain is very new. I often say to my students, “I know you’re right that we think with the brain, but how do you know? Do you feel the brain thinking or working?” The truth is, we don’t feel it. There is nothing that tells us, not even intuitively, that we think with the brain. We know this because science, culture, knowledge have taught us.

So much so that, for centuries, there were many people who thought that it was not the brain but other organs of the body that allowed us to think and reason.

Furthermore, it took a long time for people to believe that mental illnesses were linked to the brain. Today it seems natural to us, but for a long time it was believed that it was something spiritual.

BBC News – As the “natural spirits” that the Greek physician and philosopher Claudio Galen proposed as “instruments of the soul”.

Morgado – In antiquity, you didn’t know how the brain worked, or everything it does, but they thought there must be something in there. It’s exciting to talk about them! “What makes the nerves work? There has to be something! Something has to travel through the nerves to go to the muscles so they contract and we walk and talk or move,” they wondered.

But in those ancient times nothing was known about electricity, which today we know is the key to how neurons work. Any of us would also have resorted to a curious explanation, which we could call “spirits”, which transform themselves to make possible the different functions of the body, as Galen, the great physician of antiquity, proposed when speaking of “natural spirits” and “animal spirits”.

Today we may think they were very wrong and confused, but probably the most lucid minds of the time knew that these “spirits” were something that one day we would come to know more accurately.

This is what happened when, much later, in the mid-18th century, Italian Luigi Galvani began to discover from his frog experiments that electricity could cause muscles to contract, allowing him to know that the brain produces your own electricity.

And now we know that each neuron is like a small electrical plant and that the brain is, along with the digestive system, the organ in our body that uses the most energy.

BBC News – At some point it was even said that the brain was a refrigerator, and maybe they weren’t so mistaken…

Morgado – Yes! It was Aristotle who said this, the great father of philosophy. Studying Aristotle’s thought is fascinating, because his own mistakes are based on great successes, on things that he saw and that seemed to him too normal to understand that the brain could not be the organ of sensibility.

Aristotle saw the heart as the organ of sensibility, he believed it was the organ that allowed us to think and reason. But the brain had to be good for something… It wouldn’t be there for nothing! According to Aristotle, we had a refrigerator in our heads. It’s an amazing theory.

Upon observing the structure of the brain, he thought it was a blood cooler. The heart, being the organ of passions, heated the blood a lot when he was in love, and this was cooled in the brain, which returned it to the rest of the body so that it continued to function normally.

It took us a long time to leave these ideas behind. Even today, many people continue to attribute to the heart a cognitive, mental capacity that it does not have.

BBC News – Why do we keep clinging to this theory? Per that the dichotomy between brain and heart is still in force?

Morgado – It’s because a heart with an arrow stuck in it is much prettier than a brain, which looks so… crude! [risos] The heart is much redder, and the brain is dark, stratified. It is not an organ that invites us to draw attention from an aesthetic point of view. The heart, yes. Connecting it to emotions and feelings is something we are absolutely used to.

BBC News – We know little about the brain?

Morgado – Well, when someone comes to the university and asks me, “Ignacio, is it true that we know very little about the brain?” I show them a very thick book that I have in my living room, put it in their hands and say to them, “Look at this book. Do you think this is little knowledge?” And I’m usually told, “No, no! This is very knowledgeable!” [risos]

And we learned a lot about how the brain works, especially after our Spanish compatriot Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered what neurons are like, which are individual cells that connect to each other through contact but not continuity, and that makes the brain an intelligent organ. We’ve learned a lot, but there’s still a lot to learn.

BBC News – But, as much as we have learned, we know much more about the mind than the brain, right?

Morgado – No doubt! And that is why the mind began to be known – as far as it is possible to know it – long before the brain.

The great thinkers of antiquity knew a great deal about the human mind, although they knew nothing about the brain. And the scholastics [filósofos teólogos] Medieval ones wrote treatises on the human mind that still have extraordinary validity today.

Even today, the separation between the mind and the brain continues. We continue to think that the mental is something spiritual, different from the brain and the body, the root of this dualism that was first proposed by the scholastics and later by the French philosopher René Descartes (soul-body).

In the United States, Swiss-born researcher Louis Agassiz began to propose that black brains were inferior to whites and that therefore blacks only had to carry out minor jobs – no intellectual jobs or being part of the elite Social.

Later, the Nazis tried to embrace eugenics. The Nazi military and psychiatrist Max de Crinis introduced Adolf Hitler to the theory of “gentle death”, and a macabre program was launched to eliminate the “weak” and the mentally ill and create a “superior” race, which for them was the Aryan .

It has been clearly demonstrated over time that no race is inferior to another because of their brains or their genetics, but they had to justify this ideological racism, which was one of the greatest evils humanity has ever suffered.

There were also theories that said that a woman’s brain was inferior to a man’s, which luckily we have already overcome.

But now a book is circulating that talks about “female supremacy”. To justify it, there are scientists who cling to data that they like, but forget about others that do not fit their thesis. This gives me the impression that this is not the best way to help equality between men and women.

BBC News – Mr. says we now know a lot more about the brain, but what are the most important outstanding issues?

Morgado – Our big outstanding question is how to cure mental and neurological illnesses, particularly those we are so afraid of, like Alzheimer’s. Then there are things that interest us more from a philosophical point of view or that interest scientists more, such as the way in which neurons make consciousness, subjectivity, or imagination possible.

There is so much we need to know… It’s amazing! We have a body that we can see and touch and it seems to us something very understandable. But when we think about our imagination, our thoughts, our mind… “What is this? Is it air? Is it smoke? Is it again the natural spirits that have returned?” [risos]

And, look how hard it is for us to get out of the spirits! When something gets too complicated for us human beings, we tend to explain it in a supernatural way, believing that there are things that go beyond us, that go beyond ourselves. This inability of the human brain to understand certain things in our own minds is precisely what causes so many supernatural beliefs to exist and that human beings have lived, from the remotest antiquity to the present, immersed in them.

If we could understand all this that you call the mysteries of our consciousness and our subjectivity, the deepest part of the human mind, probably many religious and supernatural ideologies would not exist.

Science is still not able to explain well many things that go beyond ourselves, and it seems to me that the human brain has not evolved enough to understand them.

BBC News – And if we make it? What if one day we can really understand how our brain works?

Morgado – But I ask myself: why are we going to believe that our brains have the ability to understand everything? We say, “It can’t be that we still can’t understand certain things!” We are eager to know.

A chimpanzee cannot understand what a square root or the concept of entropy is. Their brain doesn’t have the ability to understand certain things, so we don’t try to teach them. But neither does he ask himself what imagination is, what subjectivity is, or how the brain creates consciousness.

If the chimpanzee had a human brain, it could make square roots, but it would also have a problem that it doesn’t have now and it would wonder about all these things. [risos].

This is what can happen to us too. In a few years, we may know what subjectivity is and understand how the brain creates it, but then we would have other problems that we are not even able to imagine right now.

Many of the things we ask ourselves are a creation of our own mind. And we believe that the questions we ask are absolute, that they would be here even if we didn’t exist.

“Why do things need to have a beginning and an end?” If there were no brains, no human minds to ask, that question would be meaningless. But our mind is the way it is and it needs to know why things happen. “Why are we like this?” Someday we will know. But then, we will have new questions. There will always be unknowns that surpass us.