and the first to think they came from the brain
Excellent question. I cringe when people refer to the heart when talking about kindness and emotions, eg. "she has a good heart", "my heart's breaking" etc. I know it's just conventional language now, but it used to be taken literally. Most if not all ancient cultures believed thoughts come from many of the internal organs. Many religions think they come from an invisible spirit or 'soul'. Even the bible talks about the heart as a place where emotions are felt and come from. Buddha believed thoughts come from a cavity within the heart. The quran refers to an unbeliever as having a 'diseased heart'. The ancient Egptians were so unimpressed with the brain that they didn't preserve it and threw it away, unlike the kidneys, liver, heart etc. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) knew that touching the brain caused no pain or sensation. So he judged that the heart was where sensations come from. Since headless animals like chickens can still run around, he judged the brain's function was to cool the hot blood rising from the heart.
Later, Galen (129-199 AD) relied on animal dissection, experiments, clinical practice and possibly observation of wounded gladiators. He concluded the brain is the cause of sense and voluntary movement. Debate on the brain hypothesis and cardiac hypothesis continued into the middle-ages and beyond.
In the Renaissance, anatomists (eg. da Vinci, Vesalius) started 'mapping' the human organs, including the brain. The brain hypothesisers thought that 'thought' and soul happens inside the brain. They weren't sure how the brain worked. With physics and electricity advances, the brain was seen by Luigi Galvani as an electric generator from where sparks travelled. Phrenology developed as Franz Gall (1758-1828) and Johan Spurzheim (1776-1832) fervently believed the brain is the organ of the 'mind' and that different parts of thought happen from different sections of the brain. So Galen already said thought comes from inside the head and not the heart, but he may not have been the first one and the idea just gradually creeped in with more knowledge and experience. The brain's incredibly complex so each decade new theories and discoveries are coming out on how the brain actually 'thinks' and works. The 19th century seems to have been a golden age when sophisticated theories were developed that are still in use today, like Brocha's Area and Wernicke's area (imagine having a part of the human brain named after you, showing how important such developments were). Thomas Goodwin - the readable puritan.::
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Who was the first person to think thoughts come from the heart? 
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