Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at the age of 76 of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurism. During the autopsy, conducted at Princeton Hospital, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey removed Einsteins brain -- the brain that had given the world such revolutionary thoughts as E=mc². Thomas Harvey weighed it as part of the autopsy, and the organ clocked in at 2.7 pounds (1.22 kilograms). Harvey had the brain photographed, and then the brain was sectioned into approximately 240 pieces and preserved in celloidin, some of the pieces he kept to himself while others were given to leading pathologists. Dr. Marian Diamond, who worked at the University of California at Berkeley, was studying the brain plasticity had found that, Einstein did indeed have a higher ratio of glia cells to neurons than other brains, and she hypothesized that the number of glial cells increased because of the high metabolic demand that Einstein put on his neurons. In other words, Einstein needed fantastic housekeepers because he made such a mess with all of his amazing thoughts. In 1996, a University of Alabama researcher named Britt Anderson published another study on Einsteins brain. Anderson had discovered that Einsteins frontal cortex was much thinner than normal, but that it was more densely packed with neurons, which may mean they can communicate more quickly. Dr. Sandra Witelson, the researcher at McMaster, noticed that Einsteins Sylvian fissure was largely absent. The Sylvian fissure separates the parietal lobe into two distinct compartments, and without this dividing line, Einsteins parietal lobe was 15 percent wider than the average brain. The parietal lobe is responsible for skills such as mathematical ability, spatial reasoning and three-dimensional visualization. This seemed to fit in perfectly with how Einstein described his own thought process: Words do not seem to play any roles, he once said. There are more or less clear images. The man who figured out the theory of relativity by imagining a ride on a light beam through space saw his ideas in pictures and then found the language to describe them! Witelson hypothesizes that the lack of a Sylvian fissure may have allowed the brain cells to crowd in closer to one another, which in turn enabled them to communicate much faster than normal. This brain structure may also have had something to do with Einsteins delayed speech development, which raises questions about whether its helpful to know this sort of information about yourself. If Einstein had known that his brain was different, maybe even flawed, would he have pursued academics? Einsteins corpus callosum was thicker in the vast majority of subregions than the corresponding sections in the two controls. More specifically, Einstein’s corpus callosum was thicker in the rostrum, genu, midbody, isthmus, and (especially) the splenium compared with younger controls. The corpus callosum keeps each side of the brain informed about what the other half is doing, says Dean Falk, a professor of anthropology at Florida State University, who contributed to the study. According to Falk, the corpus callosum is both physically and cognitively important. The inter-brain connection allows our hands to coordinate and our bodies to move with intention. But it also allows thoughts and ideas that are generated in the right brain to be processed and expressed with language, which originates in the left. We all have that connection between the left and right, says Falk, but for Einstein, the connection was extraordinary.
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 07:47:10 +0000
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