“I want to be cremated so people won’t come to worship at my bones,” Einstein once remarked, a tad facetiously. But that hasn’t deterred posterity from pillaging his brain to unravel the secrets of his remarkable intellect.
In 1955, the pathologist conducting Einstein’s autopsy, Thomas Harvey,removed and photographed the organ from various angles, chopped it into 240 fragments and preserved them in formalin. Harvey had hoped to compile book-length data, and disseminated the photographs among researchers. But the lack of neuro-imaging technology significantly curtailed his options. The project failed to materialize.
But with Harvey’s death in 2007, the original photographs have recently surfaced. Researchers have used them to create a “road map” connecting the 240 sections, according to The Telegraph.
Dean Falk, noted anthropologist from Florida State led the initial probe, and in an interview with Scientific American, revealed that the outside of the cerebral cortex—the brain’s seat for higher conscious thinking— contained staggeringly complex “convolutions”, which made the most of neural interconnectivity upon a fixed surface area.
Past forays already revealed peculiarities in Einstein’s brain. Harvey duly noted for example, an almost non-existent sylvian fissure – a prominent structure which separates the parietal and temporal lobes in normal brains. Neurobiologists have theorized that this may have allowed far more neurons to ‘connect’, hastening information processing. But nothing earth-shattering has emerged.
Harvey further noted the size of it to be unexceptional. A 1996 study found it was nearly 200 grams lighter than the average male’s.(If brain size corresponded with intelligence, blue whales would be the smartest species on this space rock.) Einstein’s brain is also significantly wider than average.The part responsible for mathematical processing, as expected, is much larger. And there are also a high percentage of ‘glial’ cells.
Molly Edmonds (howstuffworks) calls glials housekeepers for the brain. “As neurons communicate, they leave behind trash in the form of potassium ions, which pile up outside the neurons. But it can only go so high before the neurons stop communicating, because there’s just no more room for the potassium discharge. Glials clean up those potassium ions to allow the neurons to fire repeatedly.” Edmonds lists however, the possibility of Einstein having more glial cells because he was being compared to younger men in this study. Glials continue to divide throughout a person’s lifetime.
Einstein’s excellence with the violin is something often cited. It is now common knowledge that listening to music and doing maths fire similar neural pathways and playing classical music opens ones that would otherwise be blocked. Einstein may as well have remained a lowly clerk at the patent office, if not for early musical training.
Sandra Witelson’s 1999 study quoted Einstein’s own account of his thought process: “words do not seem to play any role” but there is “associative play” of “more or less clear images” of a “visual and muscular type”. The “muscular” aspect of his intelligence, mostly speculated upon, was tentatively confirmed in the recent probe led by Falk. It noted “an unusual region lower down in the motor cortex that processes information from the face and tongue…The motor face area in Einstein’s left hemisphere was extraordinarily expanded into a big rectangular patch that I’ve not seen in any other brain.” This may have allowed Einstein to “use his motor cortex in extraordinary ways.” It might be that Einstein was a more tactile learner.
Comparing Einstein’s brain with that of other geniuses perhaps, will make the results more comprehensive. Tools are developing for efficiently mapping neural circuitry, and taking snapshots of people’s brains should be effective in the near future. If only geniuses were born everyday.
