The Imaginative Tradition of the Location of Mind in the Body

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the imaginative tradition that developed in Western culture about the location of the mind in the body, based on art and neuroscience. Therefore, we raise several cases, belonging to historical moments varied historical, which problematize, from different perspectives, the embodiment of the mind. The result of this survey is presented here in part. The impulse that body biology causes to make correlations between body biology and mental life appears as the guiding axis of the imaginative tradition in question. Although other cases are discussed, we prioritize the presentation of medieval diagrammatic drawings inspired by ventricular theory (or cell theory), which are considered one of the earliest forms of visual representation of the brain and its functions. Such designs may be associated with what current neuroimaging technologies accomplish, such as structural and functional magnetic resonance that locates sources of behavior in areas of the body [1]. The article serves as a reference to know how the forms of representation of the mind in the body developed and how art contributed to this topic.