It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert
Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine The gray matter housed
inside that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space,
motion — the very foundations of physical reality — not just once but several
times during his astonishing career. 61)Yet while there clearly had to be
something remarkable about Einstein’s brain, the pathologist who removed it from
the great physicist’s skull after his death reported that the organ was. to all
appearances, well within the normal range — no bigger or heavier than anyone
else’s. But a new analysis of Einstein’s brain by Canadian
scientists, reported in the current Lancet, reveals that it has some distinctive
physical characteristics after all. 62)A portion of the brain that governs
mathematical ability and spatial reasoning—two key ingredients to the sort of
thinking Einstein did best — was significantly larger than average and may also
have had more interconnections among its ceils, which could have allowed them to
work together more effectively. In 1996,Harvey gave much of
his data and a significant fraction of the tissue itself to Dr Sandra Witel-son,
a neuroscientist who maintains a "brain bank" at McMaster for comparative
studies of brain structure and function. 63)These normal, undiseased brains,
willed to science by people whose intelligence had been carefully measured
before death, gave Witelson a solid set of benchmarks against which to measure
the seat of Einstein’s brilliant thoughts. Not only was
Einstein’s inferior parietal region unusually bulky, the scientists found, but a
feature called the Sylvian fissure was much smaller than average, 64)Without
this groove that normally slices through the tissue, the brain cells were pecked
close together, permitting more interconnections—which in principle can
permit more cross-referencing of information and ideas, leading to great
leaps of insight. That’s the idea, anyway. But while it’s
quite plausible according to current neurological theory, that doesn’t
necessarily make it true. We know Einstein was a genius, end we now know that
his brain was physically different from the average. But none of this proves a
cause-and-effect relationship. "What you really need, "says McLean’s Benes," is
to look at the brains of a number of mathematical geniuses to see if the same
abnormalities are present." Even if they are, it’s possible that
the bulked-brains are a result of strenuous mental exercise, not an inherent
feature that makes genius possible. 65)Bottom line: we still don’t know
whether Einstein was born with an extraordinary mind or whether he earned it,
one brilliant idea at a time.