What Einstein’s Stolen Brain Can Teach Us About Intelligence
Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s work has been hailed as “science writing at its best.” His latest book, Anatomies, is a head-to-toe history of the human body, blending science, history, and culture.What follows is an excerpt from the book, in stores now.
Albert Einstein—the greatest scientist of all time, according to many, and the greatest Jew since Jesus, in the words of J. B. S. Haldane—died in the early hours of Sunday, April 17, 1955 at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Thomas Harvey of Princeton Hospital performed the autopsy, and determined the cause of death as a ruptured aortic aneurysm. A dozen of those closest to Einstein attended a brief funeral ceremony. His body was then cremated. A little over fourteen hours had passed since the physicist drew his last breath.
However, not all of Einstein’s mortal remains were converted into the ashes that were later scattered at a secret location in order to avoid the attention of celebrity hunters. For at some time during that early Sunday morning, Harvey, acting on his own initiative and without permission from the family, removed Einstein’s brain from the skull where it had resided so profitably for seventy-six years and set it aside for examination.
Chunks of Einstein’s brain [were] stored in glass jars in a cardboard box bearing the label of a brand of cider.
He injected the internal arteries of the brain with formalin and then placed the whole organ in the preserving liquid. The brain revealed no immediate evidence of the special powers that it had possessed when alive. It was carefully measured and photographed, and then cut up into some 240 numbered pieces. Many of these pieces were further sliced into thin sections and encapsulated in layers of a celluloid-like substance so that they could be viewed under a microscope. Harvey appears to have passed many of these specimens out to scientist friends; others he kept. A Chicago doctor reportedly received one specimen as a Christmas present. Another was acquired by a Japanese professor of mathematics who collected Einstein memorabilia. When a journalist tracked Harvey down in Wichita, Kansas, in 1978, he found the remaining chunks of Einstein’s brain stored in glass jars in a cardboard box bearing the label of a brand of cider.
Parts of Einstein’s brain have been in the hands of scientists for more than fifty years now. What have we learned about how genius manifests itself in the physical body? Harvey promised to publish his findings once he had studied the brain for himself, but for a long time no research was forthcoming. Finally, in 1996, Harvey published a paper in Neuroscience Letters (pdf), giving the results of his comparison of a prepared section of Einstein’s right prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain thought to be involved in governing personality and in judging and comparing thoughts—with those of five elderly control subjects. His earth-shattering news was that Einstein’s brain possessed neurons in “no greater number and no greater size than the others.”
Einstein’s brain possessed neurons in “no greater number and no greater size than the others.”
Marian Diamond at the University of California at Berkeley had only a little more success when she requested a specimen from Harvey and received it in an old mayonnaise jar. In part of the parietal lobe on the top of the head, she found a higher than normal proportion of glial cells to neurons. Glial cells partner neurons in the brain in ways that are as yet poorly understood, contributing to brain growth and function, and are found to increase in animals when they are placed in a stimulating environment. Whether Einstein’s glial surplus was present from birth or was the consequence of his immersion at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies cannot be told.
Sandra Witelson and others at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, claim to have carried out the first examination of the gross anatomy of Einstein’s brain only in 1999. Using calipers, they compared dimensions taken from Harvey’s photographs with thirty-five normal male brains, and found no significant differences except in the parietal regions “important for visuospatial cognition and mathematical thinking.” Einstein’s parietal lobes were measured as being about a centimeter wider than the average of Witelson’s controls. Unlike all the other male brains—and unlike another fifty-six female brains also examined—Einstein’s brain also appeared to be missing a feature known as the parietal operculum, a strip of tissue bordering the lateral sulcus, one of the major clefts that divides the brain into its component lobes. Without this, the Canadian scientists speculated, Einstein’s parietal lobes were able to expand beyond the usual size, and to abut more closely with other regions of the brain, with which they may then have built an unusual number of neural connections.
Witelson concludes that “Einstein’s exceptional intellect . . . and his self-described mode of scientific thinking may be related to the atypical anatomy in his inferior parietal lobules,” but adds ruefully that her work “clearly does not resolve the long-standing issue of the neuroanatomical substrate of intelligence.”
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Hugh Aldersey-Williams is the author of Periodic Tales, which has been published in ten languages, and The Most Perfect Molecule, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Norfolk, England.
