Megamind: Inside the brain of Albert Einstein
Even 60 years after his death, Albert Einstein’s brain may still have something to teach the world.
Researchers continue to puzzle over bits of the great physicist’s brain, preserved in jars after his death in 1955, to understand the reasons for his genius. And the answers may lie in a container in Hamilton.
Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist in McMaster University’s Michael G. DeGroot School of Medicine, has been studying pieces of Einstein’s brain, preserved in celloidin, for more than 20 years.
She says recent progress in neuroimaging has made it easier to build on her previous work, a 1999 study that made international headlines for revealing highly unusual features of Einstein’s brain.
Although the size and weight of the brain were about average, she found that the inferior parietal lobe, where the work of coming up with the theory of general relativity would have been done, was 15 per cent larger than normal.
Einstein’s brain was missing something else entirely: a structure called the parietal operculum, normally found between two grooves on the surface of the brain.
McMaster neuroscientist hopes to shed new light on celebrated genius — and the rest of us
Witelson plans to take a much closer look at the peculiarities of Einstein’s brain and describe her findings in her next paper. The study is a collaboration of scientists at the universities of McMaster, Buffalo and Edinburgh, she said.
“We know there is something atypical, a unique variation, in the arrangement of his brain at the surface level. And so the hypothesis is that this must clearly represent something atypical in development at the microscopic level.”
She hopes further research will shed light not only on the workings of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated minds, but on the human brain in general. But some neuroscientists are skeptical that it will offer much valuable insight.
In fact, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University said the study of the great theorist’s brain is a “sorry and embarrassing episode in the history of neuroanatomical research.”
“Given our poor understanding of the brain at present, nothing could be learned from looking at Einstein’s brain, any more than looking at yours or mine,” Dale Purves said in an email.
Witelson disagrees. “We know that his mind was different and know the mind is the product of the brain. My best guess is that the brain is different.”
She should know, since she has 125 whole specimens in her “normal” brain collection with which to compare it.
They are usually kept on campus in what looks like a small meat freezer. (Einstein’s brain is stored separately, though Witelson won’t say where or why.)
Because the freezer was being cleaned recently, the samples were moved temporarily to a nearby lab. Some of the jars sat on top of large plastic containers, one of which still bore its original label: “Giant Bread, Bun and Pastry Saver.”
The brains once belonged to blueand white-collar Canadians who donated their organs for scientific research after succumbing to terminal cancer.
Einstein isn’t the only genius represented in the collection; the late mathematician Donald Coxeter’s brain is there, too.
Witelson says she received about one-fifth of Einstein’s brain from Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed a necropsy on Einstein at a Princeton, N.J., hospital after he died of a ruptured abdominal aneurysm at 76.
After reading about Witelson’s research and her brain bank, Harvey sent her a fax asking if she would be interested in adding a piece of Einstein to her already impressive collection.
“I wrote back in a minute with black magic marker: ‘Yes.’ I faxed it back right way,” she recalled.
“He left (Lawrence,) Kan., and never asked me how to get to my office. He just came. Just unbelievable.”
About 20 years later, Witelson still isn’t the slightest bit tired of examining Einstein’s grey and white matter through a microscope.
As for the fate of her own brain, she hasn’t thought that far ahead, she says.
“I won’t be here to study it, you see?”