Word: braine
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...only was Einstein's inferior parietal region unusually bulky, the scientists found, but a feature called the Sylvian fissure was much smaller than average. Without this groove that normally slices through the tissue, the brain cells were packed 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, and 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...
...curious tale of how the brain got to McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ont., is equally fascinating. When Einstein died of a ruptured abdominal aneurysm in 1955, at the age of 76, the pathologist who did the autopsy at Princeton Hospital, Dr. Thomas Harvey, removed the brain, pickled it in formaldehyde--and kept it. Harvey had no credentials in neuroscience, and his unauthorized appropriation of Einstein's brain appalled and outraged many scientists. Possession was evidently a point in his favor, though. At the pathologist's request, the family agreed he could keep the organ for scientific study. But over...
Finally, in 1996, Harvey gave much of his data and a significant fraction of the tissue itself to Dr. Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist who maintains a "brain bank" at McMaster for comparative studies of brain structure and function. 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. To make the comparison as valid as possible, Witelson and her team compared Einstein's tissues with those of men close...
What they found was that while the overall size of Einstein's brain was about average, a region called the inferior parietal lobe was about 15% wider than normal. "Visuospatial cognition, mathematical thought and imagery of movement," write Witelson and her co-authors, "are strongly dependent on this region." And as it happens, Einstein's impressive insights tended to come from visual images he conjured up intuitively, then translated into the language of mathematics (the theory of special relativity, for example, was triggered by his musings on what it would be like to ride through space on a beam...