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."

Comments

Stop deifying this guy

[loufoque]

Seriously.
He was just a scientist among many others.

Re:Stop deifying this guy

[martijn hoekstra]

Seriously. He was just a scientist among many others.

It is entirely possible that special relativity would have been formulated by someone else - with the problems with EM speed of light and reference frames, it could be said to have been in the air, so to say. That also goes for the photo-electric effect. General relativity was something else though, it was new, it was brilliant, and it completely shifted the way we think about the universe. He might not have been as great as Newton, but he's up there with the Very Select Few.

Re:Stop deifying this guy

[Johann Lau]

How is noticing he was rather smart deifying him? Personally, I never fully understood any of the stuff in his actual field of work, but always rather enjoyed stuff like letters or essays he wrote. I would never have heard of those however if he hadn't also been such a famous physicist. So I'm not sure what's there to moan about.. what's your angle? That nobody will bother to take a photo of your brain when you die?

Re:Stop deifying this guy

[drinkypoo]

Studying is brain is being used to define traits that make humans smart.
How is that anything short of deification?

No, it's the opposite of that. We're trying to figure out why he could make leaps others couldn't... there's nothing mystical about it. If we had other similarly interesting brains we'd study them too.

Re: Stop deifying this guy

[muon-catalyzed]

cosmological constant which he didn't abandon
Maybe this is because Einstein studied equations, he needed that constant so the model would hold mathematically, his discoveries might have been simply observations he saw in those formulas, you can move and swap variables left right in the energy equations to get exciting and unexpected relationships that involve time, mass velocity and energy.

Re: Stop deifying this guy

[Black Parrot]

Might also explain his obstanance regarding the cosmological constant which he didn't abandon until observing red shif. Might not. I'm uncertain...

Keep in mind that when he introduced the cosmological constant everyone still thought that our galaxy was the only thing in the universe. Hubble figured out that that was wrong about a decade later (and half a decade before noting the correlation between red shift and distance).

Re:Stop deifying this guy

[drinkypoo]

No, it's the opposite of that. We're trying to figure out why he could make leaps others couldn't... there's nothing mystical about it. If we had other similarly interesting brains we'd study them too.

That's the point. Others have similar capabilities, Einstein is being picked pretty randomly

No, you don't get to say "that's the point" while you're missing the point. Einstein was a genius and we have information about his brain. If any other geniuses want to donate their brains I'm sure we'll want to look at those too. Sadly, no one will ever be interested in yours on that basis.

It's like investigating Neil Armstrongs feet.

O fuck, I have been trolled. That, or I've been wasting my time talking to someone about as intelligent as an Elizabot.

Re:Stop deifying this guy

[loufoque]

if Einstein's views were regularly brought up in conversation to determine if something is smart or not (which they're not), yeah, that'd *still* not be deification

Using Einstein's brain as a metric is nothing short of religion, for the simple purpose that a single man can not be used to define what intelligence is. There isn't an even an objective answer to that.

Re: Stop deifying this guy

[Black Parrot]

Here's the relevant bit on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble#The_universe_goes_beyond_the_Milky_Way_galaxy

It's hard to imagine how different the universe must have seemed to them before that.

That's all well and good but..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all well and good but what did his brain actually taste like?

Re:No control group

[Trepidity]

Yeah, some kind of quantification is definitely missing. How unusual? How unusual among people of the same profession? How common are major physics discoveries among people who don't share such features (i.e., is it a necessary feature?). Attempting to draw conclusions about complex cognitive functions from small-n measurements of a handful of macroscopic features feels a little bit like phrenology.

or maybe genius moulds anatomy

[johnrpenner]

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

Threatened easily, I see.

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

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.

Metonymy. Conflation.

[girlinatrainingbra]

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