Observations placeholder
Swedenborg, Emanuel - The Infinite - Where is the intellect?
Identifier
003137
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Swedenborg divided up the functions of the mind and tried to attribute them to places - processors in the body.
He decided, as we can see from the quote, that the intellect was indeed the special preserve of the brain as the processor, but that we could make no such assumptions about the other functions - the functions of the emotions, for example, may reside from a processing point of view all over the body.
Furthermore functions like the ego/Personality, the perceptions and so on may also not be brain 'resident'.
This appears to be borne out by our own instinctive attribution of functions like 'love' to the heart and 'fear' to the guts!
A description of the experience
Emmanuel Swedenborg
The seat of the rational soul is in an especial sense ‘in’ the brain and does not extend beyond it.