Q: Why do we refer to memorizing as “learning by heart”? Wouldn’t “learning by brain” make more sense?
A: The expression “learn by heart” reflects an ancient belief that the heart, not the brain, is the human body’s organ of sensation and cognition.
That sense of “heart,” now sometimes called the cardiocentric hypothesis, was common in early Germanic languages, including Old English, and much earlier Egyptian, Chinese, and Greek.
More to the point, the ancient Egyptians believed that the heart recorded one’s good and bad deeds, and that the gods weighed one’s heart after death to determine whether the soul would enter the afterlife or be destroyed.
In Middle Egyptian, spoken from roughly 2000 to 1350 BC, the heart hieroglyph, transliterated as ib, looks like a jar with two handles, perhaps representing arteries and veins.
It usually meant the mind, but ib was also used in reference to the heart as an anatomical organ.
As the Egyptologist James P. Allen explains, the heart “was not only the center of physical activity but also the seat of thought and emotion” (Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, 3d ed., 2014).
In texts with ib, he writes, “the translation ‘mind’ usually makes better sense than the literal ‘heart.’ ”
To refer to the anatomical organ, he says, Egyptians usually combined ib with hat, the hieroglyph for the forepart of a lion, forming the compound glyph haty, representing the organ at the front of the chest. Various phonetic symbols could be added.
However, Allen adds that ib and haty were sometimes interchangeable. Here’s an example of ib and hat in the compound term haty, with two phonetic symbols:
In ancient Chinese, the pictograph 心 (xin) originally referred solely to the anatomical organ, but by the late fourth century BC it meant the mind as well, and is often translated by sinologists as “heart-mind.”
This is an early example of the mind sense of xin from the Mencius, an anthology of conversations and anecdotes attributed to the Confucian philosopher Mencius (circa 371-289 BC):
“心之官則思，思則得之，不思則不得也” (Xīn zhī guān zé sī, sī zé dé zhī, bù sī zé bùdé, “To the mind belongs the office of thinking. By thinking, it gets the right view of things; by neglecting to think, it fails to do this”). Translated by the 19th-century Scottish linguist and sinologist James Legge.
Around the same time, the Greek philosopher Aristotle described the heart (καρδίᾳ, kardia) as the organ of sensation. In this passage, he uses the genitive καρδίας:
“καὶ ἡ μὲν αἴσθησις καὶ ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως ἐν τῷ μέσῳ τοῦ σώματος τῆς καρδίας οὔσης” (“the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart”). From A. L. Peck’s 1968 bilingual version of Aristotle’s treatise Περὶ τῶν Ζῴων Μερών (Perì tôn Zōíōn Merôn, On the Parts of Animals).
When the word “heart” first appeared in Old English (spelled heorte, hearte, etc.), it referred to both the organ that pumps blood and the organ of mental activity—or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the bodily organ considered or imagined as the seat of feeling, understanding, and thought.”
The OED notes: “semantic developments that are widespread among other early Germanic languages include: courage; the heart as seat of life, of feeling, of thought, or of the will; centre; inner part; most important part.”
The dictionary adds that this sense of “heart” in early Germanic languages may have been influenced by the perception of the heart in classical and post-classical Latin as the “seat of thought, intelligence, will, emotion, or character.”
The earliest OED citation for the mental sense of “heart” is from a ninth-century Old English gloss, or translation, written between the lines of the eighth-century Latin in the Vespasian Psalter:
“ne forleort hie efter lustum heortan heara” (“[God] did not forsake them to the lusts of their hearts”). Psalm 80:13.
The negative particle ne in the interlinear Old English gloss changes the meaning of the original Latin: “Dimisi eos secundum desideria cordis eorum” (“I [God] let them go in accordance with the desires of their hearts”).
A scribe had inserted the Old English above the Latin in the manuscript. The gloss of the Vespasian Psalter is considered the oldest surviving portion of the Bible in English.
The earliest OED citation for “heart” in its anatomical sense is from Bald’s Leechbook, an Anglo-Saxon medical text written around the mid-ninth century: “Se maga biþ neah þære heortan & þære gelodr” (“The stomach is near the heart and the liver”).
As for the phrase “by heart” in an expression like “learn by heart,” the usage first appeared in the Middle English of the 14th century.
The OED defines “by heart” as “from memory; so as to be able to repeat or write out correctly and without assistance what has been learnt; by rote (often without proper understanding or reflection).”
The dictionary says the phrase frequently appears “with get, have, know, learn,” but in the earliest Oxford citation it’s used with “rehearse” in the archaic sense of to recite from memory:
“He was so myȝty of mynde þat he rehersed two þowsand names arewe by herte” (“He was so mighty of mind that he recited two thousand names in a row by heart”). From Polychronicon, John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1387, of an earlier 14th-century work by Ranulf Higden.
In contemporary standard dictionaries, the primary meaning of the noun “heart” is the organ that pumps blood, but the word has many modern senses derived from the ancient belief that the heart was the seat of perception and cognition.
The primary definition in Merriam-Webster online is “a hollow muscular organ of vertebrate animals that by its rhythmic contraction acts as a force pump maintaining the circulation of the blood.”
However, the M-W entry includes many other modern senses of words and phrases that recall the ancient belief. Here are some of them, along with the dictionary’s examples:
Personality (“a cold heart”), compassion (“a leader with heart”), love (“won her heart”), courage (“never lost heart”), innermost character (“knew it in his heart”), in essence (“a romantic at heart”), with deep concern (“took the criticism to heart”), and, of course, by rote or from memory (“knows the poem by heart”).
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