You can have a heart, and you can lose it. You can leave it in San Francisco. Or, you can suffer from heartache, and you might get a toothache from all the sentimental heart-shaped candies that emerge each February. That’s an awful lot of emotion for an organ that is, essentially, a big muscle.
Over the years, the heart has gone from being the body’s nerve center, to the symbolic home of the soul, and to a biomechanical marvel. Its journey tells us a little about the way we view the world and our place in it. (Meanwhile, the origins of the classic cleft-heart symbol for love are still debated.) Many of us have been taught that ancient Egyptians thought the brain was worthless, that their embalmers scooped it out through the nostrils of a mummy-in-progress and threw it away. The heart, meanwhile, was preserved in an alabaster jar so that in the afterlife, it could be weighed against a feather to determine the fate of its owner’s soul. But the truth about how the ancients viewed the heart versus the brain, as you might expect, is a little more complicated.
