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Not your average brain?
Left and right views of Einstein's brain, taken shortly after his death by medical examiner Thomas Harvey.
Credit: Brain (2012)/National Museum of Health and Medicine (See Below)
Albert Einstein is widely regarded as a genius, but how did he get
that way? Many researchers have assumed that it took a very special
brain to come up
with the theory of relativity and other stunning insights that form
the foundation of modern physics. A study of 14 newly discovered
photographs of
Einstein's brain, which was preserved for study after his death,
concludes that the brain was indeed highly unusual in many ways. But
researchers still
don't know exactly how the brain's extra folds and convolutions
translated into Einstein's amazing abilities.
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The story of Einstein's brain
is a long saga that began in 1955 when the Nobel
Prize-winning physicist died in Princeton, New Jersey, at age 76.
His son Hans Albert and executor Otto Nathan gave the examining
pathologist, Thomas
Harvey, permission to preserve the brain for scientific study.
Harvey photographed the brain and then cut it into 240 blocks, which
were embedded in a
resinlike substance. He cut the blocks into as many as 2000 thin
sections for microscopic study, and in subsequent years distributed
microscopic slides and
photographs of the brain to at least 18 researchers around the
world. With the exception of the slides that Harvey kept for himself, no
one is sure where
the specimens are now, and many of them have probably been lost as
researchers retired or died.
Over the decades, only six peer-reviewed publications resulted from
these widely scattered materials. Some of these studies did find
interesting features
in Einstein's brain, including a greater density of neurons in some
parts of the brain and a higher than usual ratio of glia (cells that
help neurons
transmit nerve impulses) to neurons. Two studies of the brain's
gross anatomy, including one published in 2009 by anthropologist Dean
Falk of Florida State
University in Tallahassee, found that Einstein's parietal lobes—possibly
linked to his remarkable ability to conceptualize physics problems—had a very unusual pattern of grooves and ridges.
But the Falk study was based on only a handful of photographs that
had been previously made available by Harvey, who died in 2007. In 2010,
Harvey's heirs
agreed to transfer all of his materials to the U.S. Army's National
Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) in Silver Spring, Maryland. For the
new study,
published today in the journal Brain, Falk teamed up with
neurologist Frederick Lepore of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School,
New Brunswick,
in New Jersey, and Adrianne Noe, director of NMHM, to analyze 14
photographs of the whole brain from the Harvey collection that have
never before been made
public. The paper also includes a "roadmap" prepared by Harvey which
links the photographs of the brain to the 240 blocks and the
microscopic slides
prepared from them, in hopes that other scientists will use them to
do follow-up research.
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The team compared Einstein's brain with those of 85 other humans
already described in the scientific literature and found that the great
physicist did
indeed have something special between his ears. Although the brain,
weighing 1230 grams, is only average in size, several regions feature additional
convolutions and folds rarely seen in other subjects. For
example, the regions on the left side of the brain that facilitate
sensory inputs into, and motor
control of, the face and tongue are much larger than normal; and his
prefrontal cortex—linked to planning, focused attention, and
perseverance in the
face of challenges—is also greatly expanded.
"In each lobe," including the frontal, parietal, and occipital
lobes, "there are regions that are exceptionally complicated in their
convolutions," Falk
says. As for the enlarged regions linked to the face and tongue,
Falk thinks that this might relate to Einstein's famous quote that his
thinking was often
"muscular" rather than in words. Although this comment is usually
interpreted as a metaphor for his subjective experiences as he thought
about the
universe, "it may be that he used his motor cortex in extraordinary
ways" connected to abstract conceptualization, Falk says. Albert
Galaburda, a
neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, says that
"what's great about this paper is that it puts down … the entire anatomy
of Einstein's brain
in great detail." Nevertheless, Galaburda adds, the study raises
"very important questions for which we don't have an answer." Among them
are whether
Einstein started off with a special brain that predisposed him to be
a great physicist, or whether doing great physics caused certain parts
of his brain to
expand. Einstein's genius, Galaburda says, was probably due to "some
combination of a special brain and the environment he lived in." And he
suggests that
researchers now attempt to compare Einstein's brain with that of
other talented physicists to see if the brain's features were unique to
Einstein himself
or are also seen in other scientists.
Falk agrees that both nature and nurture were probably involved,
pointing out that Einstein's parents were "very nurturing" and
encouraged him to be
independent and creative, not only in science but also in music,
paying for piano and violin lessons. (Falk's 2009 study found that a
brain region linked
to musical talent was highly developed in Einstein's brain.)
"Einstein programmed his own brain," Falk says, adding that when the
field of physics was ripe for new insights, "he had the right brain in
the right place
at the right time."
*The images of Einstein’s brain are published in Falk, D., Lepore,
F., Noe, A. (2012). The cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein: a
description and preliminary analysis of unpublished photographs. Brain
(doi #doi:10.1093/brain/aws295). They are reproduced here with
permission from the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver
Spring, Maryland.
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