Joanna Carver, reporter
The images of Einstein's brain are published in Falk, Lepore & Noe (2012, The cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein: a description and preliminary analysis of unpublished photographs, Brain (DOI: 10.1093/brain/aws295) and are reproduced here with permission from the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Silver Spring, MD.
The mystique surrounding Albert Einstein's brain as the source of his intellectual power seems to only have intensified since his death in 1955 at age 76. You can even poke at his grey matter in an iPad app. When the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose special theory of relativity changed the way we look at physics, died of an aneurysm, his son gave permission for his father's brain to be removed and studied.
It was dissected and photographed by pathologist Thomas Harvey, and in 2010 14 of his photos were rediscovered when they were donated to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. According to a study published last week in the neurology journal Brain, Einstein's remarkable intelligence could be attributed to his prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for speech as well as imagining events and simulating their consequences. His is dramatically expanded from a normal brain.
The researchers also noticed that there is a large knob on his motor cortex, representing Einstein's early extensive practice playing the violin.
After it was photographed, Einstein's brain was divided into 240 sections and mapped so that observers of the blocks could understand which sections of the brain they were looking at. One hundred and eighty of the brain blocks are at the University Medical Centre of Princeton, but many more are unaccounted for, raising the possibility that there's a piece of Einstein's brain in your grandparent's attic.
Journal reference: Brain DOI: 10.1093/brain/aws295
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