Einstein's Brain:
Built for Brilliance
     Albert Einstein's brain was very different from yours and mine. What was inside his shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space and motion. There had to be something remarkable about Einstein's brain, but the doctor who examined the brain after Einstein's death reported that it was, to all appearances, normal -- no bigger or heavier than anyone else's.
However, Candian scientists analyzed Einstein's brain in 1999 and revealed that it had some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning was significantly larger than average. Its cells may have been more closely connected, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively.

     The curious tale of how the brain got to McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, is also fascinating. In 1955, when Einstein died at the age of 76, Dr. Thomas Harvey removed the brain during the autopsy at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey. He kept it preserved in formaldehyde. This unauthorized appropriation of Einstein's brain appalled and outranged many scientists. However, the family agreed that Dr. Harvey could keep it for scientific study. Over the next four decades, Dr. Harvey seemed to do little further investigation of the brain. For a while, according to several reports, he stored it behind a cooler in his office.

     Finally, in 1996, Dr. Harvey gave his data and a significant fraction of the brain itself to Dr. Sandrea Witelson, a neuroscientist at McMaster who maintains a "brain bank" for comparative studies of brain structure and function. Dr. Witelson and her team compared Einstein's brain tissues with those from males close to his age, whose intelligence had been carefully assessed before death.

     They found that a region which controls spatial awareness, mathematical thought and imagery of movement (called the inferior parietal lobe) was about 15% wider than normal. we know that Einstein's insights tended to come from visual images which he translated into mathematical language. For example, one of his famous theories came from Einstein imagining himself riding through space on a beam of light. Another feature of his brain was that separations between sections were smaller than normal. Einstein's brain cells were packed more closely together, permitting more interconnections. According to scientific theory, this can result in increased cross-referencing of information and ideas, leading to great leaps of insight.

     While this theory fits current neurological thinking, that doesn't necessarily make it true. We know Einstein was a genius, and we now know his brain was physically different from average. But this doesn't prove a cause-and-effect relationship. We need to examine the brains of other mathematical geniuses to see whether similar characteristics are present. Even if they are, it's possible that the bulked-up brains result from strenuous mental exercise, rather than in-born features that make genius possible. Although Canadian scientists have made a fascinating discovery, we still don't know whether he developed it, one brilliant idea at a time.