Consciousness in the Heart

Many passages of the Quran make the bold claim that the center of the mind is in the heart:

Similarly, the the Prophet affirms the stance in multiple Hadiths:

One may object and ask: "How would the center of the mind, consciousness, and rational thinking be located in the heart, opposed to the well-known fact that it's actually in the brain?" The answer to this is that it's obviously a common figure of speech which we still use today. Have you not heard somebody ask "tell me what is in your heart"? It's not taken literally, it simply represents the innermost feelings, thoughts or secrets. All the commentaries on this verse show that the reference to "the breasts" is concerning the "innermost secrets." The Quran is not saying people have brains in their breasts, this is but an idiom.

The question here remains; is the mind located in the heart or in the brain? In reality, the human mind cannot be reduced to neuroscience and brain chemistry; even science today is completely incapable of explaining where consciousness came from (thus creating yet another dilemma for atheism, which is that the unconscious can't create the conscious).

The brain is composed of nerves, a load of bundles of neurons that work like wires. All that takes place in the brain is the exchange of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane. The brain is made of neurons (electrical wires), and neurotransmitters (chemical messengers), which carry electrical pulses from one neuron to the next target neuron. However, a dogmatic belief emerged at the beginning of the 20th century that the brain isn't only neural wires, but also is the source of rational decision-making; the center of the mind. But the brain on the anatomical level is merely made up of a complex network of neurons, and on the physiological level, neurons communicate with each other via neurotransmitters and ion exchange across the cell membrane. This means that the brain is an executive nervous system; a system that uses electrical activity to perform complex neuromuscular tasks. Never has anyone who studied medicine in history claimed that the brain is the center of the mind; medically, the brain is nothing more than an executive system, not a legislative system. Everything produced from the brain is merely reactionary; with the brain, we react, and definitely not reason nor rationalize.

Dr. Welder Penfield, the famous American-Canadian neurosurgeon and one of the greatest brain research studies scientists in the last century, has made of the most important contributions to the study of the human brain during the 1930s; he was doing his experiments during brain operations where he performed on patients using local anesthetics (meaning that the patients were fully awake and conscious). He would then literally electrocute a specific part of the brain (e.g., the brain area responsible for moving the hand), and the patient's hand would move. The brain would send out a signal to the muscles responsible for this movement, so the patient's hand would move. Dr. Penfield would then ask the conscious patient to stop his hand while electrocuting the brain area responsible for moving the hand, but the irony is that the patient was unable to stop his hand from moving; he tried and failed to convince the brain despite insisting. He would then conclude that even if the patient made a rational, conscious, and cognitive decision, the hand won't respond, because man, with his mind, will, consciousness, decision-making, and perception is one thing, and his brain, with its electrical synapses, nerve fibers, chemical vectors, and neuronal connections is a whole other thing.

In fact, all nervous system diseases and brain diseases can be understood only if the brain is treated as an electrical nervous machine, and nothing more; in order to give any medication that fixes any brain problem (e.g., a problem with neurotransmitters), you must first accept that the brain follows fixed laws, and that the brain has nothing to do with rational decision-making, otherwise you won't be able to describe any treatment. You will never understand neurology if you treat the brain as the center of the mind and the center of rational choice. If you treat the brain that way, you will jeopardize the patient's safety and kill him.

The brain has, therefore, nothing to do with decision-making, nor with the mind, nor the will. The brain is independent of the mind. You can't willfully stop your hand from shaking if you have Parkinson's disease because the neurotransmitters are affected, so the brain keeps sending activation signals that tell the patient's hand to keep shaking. Dr. Penfield has repeated the aforementioned experiment hundreds of times in hundreds of surgeries before finally coming out with his book, Mystery of the Mind, where he wrote the summary of these researches:

A very important question would be: "Why do drugs or concussion (i.e., mild brain injury) cause memory loss or even briefly alter consciousness?" The brain is very much akin to a TV set, a mere receiver and processor of information through signals, where if the cable connecting your TV has issues, it simply loses signal. The same happens with the brain due to anesthesia, taking hallucinogenic substances (e.g., alcohol and drugs), or concussion, where if the cable connecting to the "device" (i.e., the brain) has issues, it leads to the loss of consciousness like the TV signal loss.

Just as the TV is merely a transmitter and processor of information, that doesn't store information in the first place; the same case is with the brain, where the mind uses the brain as a machine of transmitting and processing, as confirmed by Dr. Roger Sperry, who received a Nobel Prize for his investigations of brain function. There even exists a book called "The Self and Its Brain" by John C. Eccles, who is a Nobel laureate in Medicine, which confirms that the brain is just a processor of information, and that the mind and consciousness are immaterial things that do not belong to this material world. Truly a mystery.