Word: witelson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...tiny gland is larger in homosexual than in straight men. But some scientists believe this structure governs daily rhythms rather than sexual behavior, so it is difficult to see any significance in the finding. Investigations of right- and left-handedness have also provided evidence of a physiological distinction. Sandra Witelson, a professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., has found more left-handers among homosexual women in her studies than among heterosexual women. Others have made the same observation among men. Since hand preference may be determined in part by the influence of sex hormones on the brain...
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