Word: lobe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Einstein's executors secretly scattered his ashes. But they were defeated at least in part by a pathologist who carried off his brain in hopes of learning the secrets of his genius. Only recently Canadian researchers, probing those pickled remains, found that he had an unusually large inferior parietal lobe--a center of mathematical thought and spatial imagery--and shorter connections between the frontal and temporal lobes. More definitive insights, though, are emerging from old Einstein letters and papers. These are finally coming to light after years of resistance by executors eager to shield the great relativist's image...
That sort of impairment has convinced scientists that the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus are key in transforming short-term memories into permanent ones, and also that permanent memories are stored somewhere else; otherwise, H.M. would have lost them...
...wore on, his performance improved. Some part of his brain was retaining a memory of an earlier practice session, a so-called implicit--rather than explicit, or consciously remembered--memory. People who suffer from Alzheimer's disease exhibit the same sort of behavior--and it's the medial temporal lobe that is first affected by this devastating disease...
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...
...Perpetual Motion, the first Mainstage show of the semester, Harvard dancers take their foot work and finesse to the Lobe Mainstage for the first time in over 20 years, beautifully proving that they well deserve this long-awaited spot light. Until this past weekend, campus dance performances seemed forever confined to lecture halls and small performance spaces hardly capable of illuminating the subtle beauty and powerful art of dance in live performance. Directors Daphne Adler '99 and Kiesha Minyard '99, both past co-directors of the Harvard Radcliffe Ballet company, obviously knew that the Mainstage is an ideal venue...