"'...that's hardly believable. Neural paths would get too long...Every animal I know of, if it has a central nervous system at all, keeps the brain close to the principal sense organs: which are usually located in the head.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 582.
If there is a head, of course. Are there animals, mobile organisms, without central nervous systems? Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers have a brain protected within the body with no head but an eye and a mouth/hand at the end of each neck/arm.
In one of Niven's Draco Tavern stories, a dialogue goes something like: "Do you have a central nervous system? Is it at the top?"
Science fiction writers need to be very imaginative about the shapes of alien bodies. See here.
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