Albert Einstein died in Princeton on April 18, 1955. His dying wish was a modest funeral without much publicity - and it happened. The scientist's body was cremated, and at the funeral, which was attended by only 12 people, his ashes were scattered in the wind. However, the scientist was cremated … not all. His brain is supposedly still stored in formalin, available for research.
The scientist's brain was extracted by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed the autopsy of Einstein at Princeton Hospital. At that time, it seemed to the doctor for granted that the brain of a great scientist should be studied - moreover, he was sure that the scientist himself bequeathed this. The fact that his actions were subsequently identified as theft was a shock to him.
Harvey photographed the brain from every possible angle and then carefully cut it into 240 small pieces, each of which was packed in a formalin jar or colloidal film.
When the fact of hiding Einstein's brain became known, Harvey was asked to return him to a relative, but he flatly refused. Almost immediately this was followed by dismissal, later - a divorce from his wife. Harvey's life was completely ruined - until the end of his days he worked as an ordinary worker in a factory, only in old age giving interviews for a documentary film about his "theft". Later, in hindsight, Einstein's relatives gave permission to study the scientist's brain.
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The first study of Einstein's brain took place in 1984 - 29 years after the scientist's death. Then a group of scientists published in the journal "Experimental Neurology" two areas of Einstein's brain (9 and 39 of Brodmann's field) with similar areas of the control group. The scientists concluded that the ratio of the number of neuroglial cells to neurons in Einstein was higher than in others.
This study was so criticized that no one took its results seriously. Among the main arguments were those that the control group consisted of only 11 people, which is too few for comparison, and moreover, they were all significantly younger than Einstein at the time of his death.
15 years later, these mistakes were taken into account and an article published in the medical journal "The Lancet" reported on the study of a larger group of people whose average age was just 57 years old - it was with them that the scientist's brain was compared. The researchers then identified the special areas of the brain responsible for the ability to mathematics, and noted that they are larger than the rest, and the scientist's brain itself was 15% wider than the average brain.
Between these studies, there was one more - in 1996, during which they found out the total weight of Einstein's brain (1230 g), which is slightly less than the average brain of an adult male (1400 g), but in contrast to this, it was put that the density of neurons in Einstein was much and much more than usual. Apparently, the researchers suggest, this provided the scientist with a much larger and more intense connection between neurons and, accordingly, better brain activity.
Harvey himself all this time kept the photographs and the very brain of Einstein himself until his death. He passed away in 2007, after which his family transferred all of this data to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs. Despite the fact that Harvey has repeatedly stated that he collaborated with other scientists while examining Einstein's brain, no documents of these experiments have been found.
Later, in 2012, anthropologist Dean Falk examined Einstein's brain from photographs. She discovered that the scientist had a highly developed part that is generally considered to be developed in left-handed musicians. Actually, the fact that Einstein played the violin is not a secret.
She also found an extra gyrus in the frontal lobe of the brain, thought to be responsible for memory and the ability to plan ahead. Einstein's corpus callosum, according to Dean Falk's report, also differs from most people - it is significantly thicker, which could mean that the communication of information between the two hemispheres of the scientist's brain was more intense.
Terence Hines, a psychologist at a university in New York, considers all of this research a waste of time. He is sure that the brain of each person is so individual that even if you find another person with exactly the same characteristics, it will not mean that this person turns out to be a genius. He argues that it is simply impossible to reveal genius by the physical dimension of the brain.
Was Einstein a genius because his brain was special in some way, or did his brain become special precisely because the scientist was a genius? This question is still open.
Albert Einstein at the age of 25.