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Newly Released Einstein Brain Photos Hint At the Anatomy of Genius
scibri writes "Photographs of Einstein's brain taken shortly after his death, but never before analysed in detail, have now revealed that it had several unusual features, providing tantalizing clues about the neural basis of his extraordinary mental abilities. The most striking observation was 'the complexity and pattern of convolutions on certain parts of Einstein's cerebral cortex,' especially in the prefrontal cortex, and also parietal lobes and visual cortex. The prefrontal cortex is important for the kind of abstract thinking that Einstein would have needed for his famous thought experiments on the nature of space and time, such as imagining riding alongside a beam of light. The unusually complex pattern of convolutions there probably gave the region a larger-than-normal surface area, which may have contributed to his remarkable abilities."
Seriously.
He was just a scientist among many others.
That's all well and good but what did his brain actually taste like?
...Ronald Reagan, Bill Gates, Andrei Chikatilo and other people famous for various forms of stupidity and mental deficiency, have the same traits.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This is interesting, but will this tell us if his brain is truly different from any other physicist, mathematician? Before we go making any pronouncements, I think we should do a little more research into people of his profession.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
we are quick to attribute a causal relationship: a certain anatomy causes genius; but this is, strictly speaking, an interpretation. we can not dismiss out of hand that a sense of genius works into a given environment, and moulds and forms the brain from habits that result from genius, rather than genius resulting from habits — the brain the enscribed result of the history of your thinking — the history of your perception of thoughts and mental effort (or lack thereof).
2cents from sunny and cold toronto island
jp
whether Einstein was born with these "unusually complex pattern of convolutions" or if they were developed because he thought about difficult physical and mathematical problems all his life.
It's natural for homo sapiens with average intelligence to fear the gifted. After all, if you admit they exist, then you may have to accept that their insights into things you don't understand may be true, and the fallacies you believe for the sake of convenience may be false. Einsten owns you, loufoque. Even dead. Cults of personality are often dangerous, yes. This is not such a case.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
First thing the title made me think of, sorry about the Godwin: They Saved Hitler's Brain.
Same thing with molars. I keep reading article about finding a 100000 year old human molar in the rift valley or something. All the complex pattern on the molars... are they the same for all human beings? Or are they as distinct as finger prints?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Einstein specifically requested his brain not be analyzed or end up as a grotesque and bizarre display stoking morbid curiosity.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Unlike our brains, maybe the differences in his brain explain why he loved his cousin.
Funny, it looks just like my brain.
Obviously this is an attempt to biologize intelligence which, as we all know, is on the slippery slope to becoming anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.
Seastead this.
I don't remember the exact details, but I recall that if you define say 20 parameters for measuring an object, there is a high probability that one of the parameters will be several sigma removed from the mean. So if you take a brain you already know is Einstein's, you can eventually find a property of that brain which is far from average. Does that mean he was a genius because of that property? Probably not.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That comment is so insightful that I think we should analyze your brain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMTQFFFeOVs
Quick - burn the heretic! It's 'anti-semitic' to not bow down to all Jews!
Einstein was a nobody, who happened to be a JEW, and thus his JEWISH brothers have hyped him up as the 'greatest genius in the history of mankind'. What exactly did Einstein DO that bettered the world, that makes him so important?
Just like you believe that 'modern art' is 'art', even though it plainly isn't - it's another invention of the talentless JEW, the hater of all things beautiful.
"I highly recommend Tom Wolfe’s book on modern art, The Painted Word, and his follow-up book on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, as excellent exposés of the characters who made and promoted modern art and architecture. Though Wolfe does not use the word “Jew” [Tom Wolfe, a White man, is married to a Jew – Ed.] even a quick perusal of the book (especially The Painted Word) will reveal who was behind the cultural con-job that was and is “modern art.”
The expression “painted word” is a reference to the fact that “modern art” is entirely based on “art theory,” hence it is effectively “painted theory.” (Aesthetician Arthur Danto has even claimed that “art is dead” precisely because “art” has transformed into “philosophy” or “art theory.”) The Jewish “theory” behind “modern art” is intended to “explain” the art, so as to make naive Gentiles think that such “art” has great value. Without such “theory” normal people would immediately recognize that such degenerate and primitivistic trash is not art at all.
The Painted Word features a number of photographs of the main players in the 20th century art world and, not surprisingly, they are almost all Jewish. (“Art critic,” i.e., charlatan, Harold Rosenberg looks like the devil himself!) This includes the “artists” and their promoters, such as con man Clement Greenberg, the Jew who promoted the art of the alcoholic degenerate Jackson Pollock. [Pollock, who we must reluctantly admit was a White man, was married to Jewish abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner – Ed.] Greenberg would buy Pollock’s paintings at cut-rate prices, write glowing articles about Pollock’s brilliance as an artist, wait for the demand for Pollock’s paintings to skyrocket, and then sell the paintings at exorbitant prices. A fine swindle, that.
Flipping through the rest of the book reveals pictures of the “artists” and art promoters Barnett Newman, Leo Steinberg, Robert Rauschenberg [Rauschenberg was also a homosexual – Ed.], among others. Overall, the book provides an excellent look at the way a series of destructive, culturally subverting Jewish “theories” transformed what was the noble and beautiful tradition of Western art into yet another grotesque Jewish deformation and mockery. Jewish opposition to truth in philosophy and the social sciences is paralleled by Jewish opposition to beauty in the arts."
Is he a genius because of the shape of his brain? Or is the shape of his brain the result of a lifelong pursuit of the intellectual? It's like saying someone lifts weights because they have overdeveloped muscles.
Compare Windows 8 running on an ARM processor tablet to MacOS 8 running on a Powerbook G3 laptop by comparing their visual display of the operating system. Now try to compare a transmission-electron microscope image of the ARM chip vs the PowerPC G3 chip.
Hell, to equalize things a bit, compare Basilisk running on an AMDx64 chip running a Linux OS vs Basilisk running on an Intel Core i7 with Windows OS (pick your flavor) vs MacOS 7 running on a 68040-bare-hardware Mac IIci. Now run the same program on the emulated MacOS. What does looking at the hardware traces and the PNP-transistors vs NPN-transistors vs. the amount of area used for level I vs level II cache tell you?
Hells bells, now run Linux debian on three chips: AMD, Intel, ARM, get into a terminal and watch what it does. Does the underlying hardware matter as much as what is running on it?
Sometimes, looking at the bare metal will tell you nothing at all about what the system does or is capable of when it is "alive" with electrons running through it and with a particular program in its memory.
I bet the brain is like that. Looking at the specific brain might tell you very little of the "mind" that ran on it when the neurons' chemical and electrical activities created the physiological system that was Einstein's mind.
:>) ::
That is what makes this analysis like phrenology:
- conflating the mind with the brain;
- conflating the body with the person that lived in it / inhabited it;
- conflating the running simulation for the architecture and hardware upon which the simulation is running;
- conflating the hardware with the running software program; ;
- conflating the container for the thing contained
Metonymy
Your analogy regarding the "bare metal" is the most sensible observation offered on this thread.
Does a person think with surface area? Without comparative data from a large number of individuals and some known relation between brain surface area and intelligence, there is no significance to the shape of a man's brain compared to that of another man.
Except the brain is what generates the mind, it is not a general purpose computing device.
It would be more like examining a chip and recognizing it as a graphics or sound processor.
Features of the brain define features of the mind.
It is almost certainly a general purpose computing device in the sense that it's Turing-complete and can thus simulate any other Turing-complete device (in principle) and possibly be simulated by any other Turing-complete device. Other distinctions of "general purpose" are much less clear cut.
uh..I bet it isn't..because it isn't. You may or may not have heard of neural networks. Until you find a computer that's completely run by neural networks, and organized with all the different bain segments - parietal, prefrontal etc. please don't make idiotic comparisons. .. Metonymy
This whole thing smacks of the crackpot science of phrenology. (i.e. a psychological theory or analytical method based on the belief that certain mental faculties and character traits are indicated by the configurations of the skull. In other words, reading the bumps on a person's head.)
Sure there are very broad indications that certain parts of the brain are associated with broadly defined functions. There may also be a valid general inference that more wrinkles in a brain are better. But those things are a million miles away from making inferences about an individual's intelligence by looking at the wrinkles. Even more remote is being able to distinguish intelligence from genius by looking at a slice of flesh. I say poppycock.
Someone explain to me how this whole branch of science differs from phrenology.
Some wise people say the brain is more like a radio antenna, picking up frequencies that comes from more subtle layers. Until we've RUN the tests, we will never truly know. I agree, we've yet to see evidence neural nets are enough for creating our minds. I do agree it _seems_ pretty darn close, given the unimaginable power of the brain though, but still, cannot really see how "me" can be created by that alone. There's basically two options: a subtle link or ghost in the machine. Given the seemingly endless complexity of the universe, I would never ever discount "subtle link". You could even call it "God", I would be fine by that too, whatever expands the mind.
You are forgetting that the program that is running on the brain is also stored on the brain. There is no mind separate from the brain, and no person. This is the current scientific understanding of the consciousness.
However, it is true that looking at the brain structure does not tell us everything about the person. A living brain is a dynamic, chaotic system that has been built up while it was running. Imagine a computer that was booted to a very basic operating system and then the OS was enhanced, little-by-little, over the years, without a reboot. Most program pathways were replaced several times, only some very essential ones were left largely untouched. The currently running programs might not exist on the disk anymore, just left in the RAM.
When the brain dies, a lot of information is lost. The dynamic chemical balance will be gone, the neurons will not fire because their neighbours did not fire, etc. It is somewhat like RAM contents fading out. The mind that emerged from the living brain does not exist anymore. Looking at a dead brain tells us little of that brain.
Still, even that little information can be helpful for us. Like X-raying competitor's chips is still done sometimes, scanning the dead brain can be insightful. An expert in chip design will easily recognize different areas of the chip and make educated assumptions about them. He will notice an unusual design in the chip and even if he does not know what that part is doing, it will be a good starting point for reverse engineering. A brain expert can do the same. For example, brain scans show London taxi drivers have enlarged hippocampus to store all the street names and routes, even though the scans do not show the street names themselves.
Compare Windows 8 running on an ARM processor tablet to MacOS 8 running on a Powerbook G3 laptop by comparing their visual display of the operating system. Now try to compare a transmission-electron microscope image of the ARM chip vs the PowerPC G3 chip.
Hell, to equalize things a bit, compare Basilisk running on an AMDx64 chip running a Linux OS vs Basilisk running on an Intel Core i7 with Windows OS (pick your flavor) vs MacOS 7 running on a 68040-bare-hardware Mac IIci. Now run the same program on the emulated MacOS. What does looking at the hardware traces and the PNP-transistors vs NPN-transistors vs. the amount of area used for level I vs level II cache tell you?
Hells bells, now run Linux debian on three chips: AMD, Intel, ARM, get into a terminal and watch what it does. Does the underlying hardware matter as much as what is running on it?
Sometimes, looking at the bare metal will tell you nothing at all about what the system does or is capable of when it is "alive" with electrons running through it and with a particular program in its memory.
I bet the brain is like that. Looking at the specific brain might tell you very little of the "mind" that ran on it when the neurons' chemical and electrical activities created the physiological system that was Einstein's mind. :>)
That is what makes this analysis like phrenology:
- conflating the mind with the brain;
- conflating the body with the person that lived in it / inhabited it;
- conflating the running simulation for the architecture and hardware upon which the simulation is running;
- conflating the hardware with the running software program; ;
- conflating the container for the thing contained ::
Metonymy
I hopefully will utter these words only once in my lifetime . . . there's nothing better than girlinatrainingbra.
This is "selection bias" taken to an extreme. I read he had a lump on the left parietal lobe from playing the violin and that pianists have a corresponding lump on the right. Did you read this in the Onion?
Tesla on the other hand, he was truly a genius. Tesla was smarter then Einstein in every way. And Tesla had a much higher intellect.
The layout of the brain is the software. The hardware is the neurons/glia. If you RTFA, you'll see it talks about both. For the hardware, slightly smaller than average brain, more glia than normal. For the software, more convolutions in the smarty-pants part of the brain (where relativity comes from) and enlarged left-hand motor area (probably due to violin)--would be analogous to saying "this software appears to have greater logical complexity than average, and has additional code for doing left-hand things"
the brain however does not have a Von Neumann archetecture, biological systems don't work that way. The closest thing electronically to the brain is an FPGA that implements very clever algorithms in hardware. And with analog systems, you can tell exactly how something works by analyzing it's structure. This is why a person can still be themselves and function after their brain has been temporarily disengaged (such as in cases of Hypothermia).
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
Casteism
The complexity and convolutions could we explained by the kind of unique mental excercises Einstein engaged in to arrive at his theories. The mental processes altered brain physiology, rather then the other way round.
AccountKiller
In the same article, they claim two opposing features are both representative of his genius. Absence of a furrow in parietal suggests greater connectivity (tracts tend to be somewhat reduced going 'around' bends vs. 'across' them). Conversely, increased convolutions in frontal suggest greater surface area (ignoring the prior mention that his brain was smaller than average). Give me a break. Until we get a decent library of brains (which some folks are working on, thankfully), this is all as bad as evolutionary psychology (you know - girls like pink because they used to pick berries, and similar bs). We don't even know much about normative topologies, and certainly not about precise form-function relations...
I bet the brain is like that. Looking at the specific brain might tell you very little of the "mind" that ran on it when the neurons' chemical and electrical activities created the physiological system that was Einstein's mind.
Actually that's where you are wrong. The brain is not just hardware with variable software - it actually changes physically based on what you do with it (within certain ranges). This concept is called neuroplasticity. So studying Einstein's brain actually tells us what parts were used more often and in combination with other parts, by examining the number and strength of connections between different brain regions. Also, since we have a general understanding of the function of brain regions by location, we can see if Einstein had some regions that were enlarged more than by chance or whether there were structural differences in his brain which might have made the way he thought about things different from the norm.