| Of course it was—people's brains are as different
as their faces. In his lifetime many wondered if there was anything
especially different in Einstein's. He insisted that on his death
his brain be made available for research. When Einstein died in
1955, pathologist Thomas Harvey quickly preserved the brain and
made samples and sections. He reported that he could see nothing
unusual. The variations were within the range of normal human variations.
(As it happened, the
brain was a bit smaller than average; size is not correlated with
intelligence.) There the matter rested until 1999. Inspecting
samples that Harvey had carefully preserved, Sandra F. Witelson
and colleagues discovered that Einstein's brain lacked a particular
small wrinkle (the parietal operculum) that most people have. Perhaps
in compensation, other regions on each side were a bit enlarged;
later they were found to have other unusual features. These
regions, the inferior parietal lobes, are known to have something
to do with visual imagery and mathematical thinking. Thus Einstein
was apparently better equipped than most people for a certain type
of thinking. Yet others of his day were probably at least as well
equipped—Henri Poincaré and David Hilbert, for example, were formidable
visual and mathematical thinkers, both were on the trail of relativity,
yet Einstein got far ahead of them. What he did with his brain depended
on the nurturing of family and friends, a solid German and Swiss
education, and his own bold personality.
A late bloomer: Even at
the age of nine Einstein spoke hesitantly, and his parents feared
that he was below average intelligence. Did he have a learning or
personality disability (such as "Asperger's syndrome,"
a mild form of autism)? There is not enough historical evidence
to say. Albert was a thoughtful and somewhat shy child, but within
the normal range of personality. If he had difficulties in school
it may have been less a peculiarity of his brain than resistance
to the authoritarian German teachers, perhaps compounded by the
awkward situation of a Jewish boy in a Catholic school.
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