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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. 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—the inferior parietal lobes. These regions 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. Probably Albert was simply a thoughtful and somewhat shy
child. If he had some difficulties in school, the problem was probably
resistance to the authoritarian German teachers, perhaps compounded
by the awkward situation of a Jewish boy in a Catholic school.
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