—Isaac Newton, 1675 THE BRAIN HAS NOT always gotten respect. When turning a corpse into a mummy, the ancient Egyptians used a small hook to scrape brain matter out through the nostrils. Then they threw it away. After all, the brain did so little—everyone knew that intelligence and emotions arose from the heart, which was carefully preserved. Ancient Babylonians revered the liver as the true source of thought and emotion. The great thinkers of ancient Greece were divided. Some, including Plato, concluded from early anatomical studies that the brain was the center of intelligence. However, Aristotle, that powerhouse born in 384 B.C., insisted the center of thought was in the center of the body: the heart. The brain was merely a sort of air conditioner, cooling off the body from the heat the heart made with all that thinking and feeling. Galen, the famous physician from the second century A.D., knew the mind resided in the brain, yet his approach to treating a mentally disturbed patient was way off the mark.
