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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?
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
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.
Some evidence suggests that it is developed. Specifically, studies of London cabbies' brains.
Have gnu, will travel.
All we need to do is to compare them against our gold standard, Mr. Abbey Normal.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That was just the hippocampus (according to the Wikipedia article). TFA here talks about cortical enlargement.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
Funny, it looks just like my brain.
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
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.
You are way wrong, read on the dadaist, the modern art movement was seeded by theirs manifesto. No need to involve racial conspiracy.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Oh, and I forgot to tell you that is was all a big prank.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
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.
His convolutions is also not a new observation. My mother told me they were aware of this, and that was at least 35 years ago, so they probably knew the moment they pulled it out.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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?
"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...