People are stupid, always have been - took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement”.
Heck, people literally used to think eyes are the source of light since everything is dark when you close them.
People are immensely, incredibly, unimaginably stupid. It has taken a lot of miracles put together to get us where we are now…but the fundamentals of what we are haven’t changed.
You're confusing ignorance with stupidity. People at the time were coming to the best conclusions they could based on the evidence they had. That isn't stupid. If humans were truly "incredibly, unimaginably stupid" we wouldn't have even gotten to the point of creating agriculture, much less splitting the atom. We didn't get here through "miracles," we got here through hard work and intelligence.
Stupid is people in 2025 believing the world is flat and germ theory is a hoax. Ignorance becomes stupidity when our species stands on the shoulders of giants but some people simply refuse to open their eyes.
Ignorance is when you don’t know something. Stupidity is when you think you know something and are presented with evidence to the contrary, but you dismiss it because of something stupid (i.e., irrational).
Of course, all these words have some overlap. My larger point is, people rarely come to rational conclusions organically, and it takes decades to centuries for even the most empirically verifiable idea to permeate, especially in the face of misinformation campaigns or when against “common sense”.
> took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement”
So what you are saying is that beings without a central nervous system cannot experience "excitement"?
or perhaps the meaning of too many words has changed, and their context. When Hippocrates claimed that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, perhaps he meant that we use our thought to temper our emotions, i.e. what he said agrees with our modern understanding.
However, many people read Hippocrates and laugh at him, because they think he meant the brain was some kind of radiator.
Maybe because we stopped talking about "excitable" people as being "hot-blooded"
>or perhaps the meaning of too many words has changed, and their context. When Hippocrates claimed that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, perhaps he meant that we use our thought to temper our emotions, i.e. what he said agrees with our modern understanding.
The belief that the heart was the seat of thought and emotion was shared by numerous cultures[0], and was based on their naive interpretation of physiology and biology and cannot be dismissed as a modern misinterpretation of a single vague aphorism by a single person due to the preponderance of documentary evidence to the contrary from contemporary sources. Also, you're probably talking about Aristotle, not Hippocrates.
>Maybe because we stopped talking about "excitable" people as being "hot-blooded"
Also people still say "hot blooded" all the time.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiocentric_hypothesis