Hi...
February 8, 2012
Albert Einstein’s brain is
housed at McMaster University – Hamilton, ON (WOW!)
Here's the story of how it got here -- to the "brain bank" --- & that's a similar description, I think, of Canada's Golden Horseshoe --- it's a "brain bank"...
"Albert Einstein's brain was very different from yours and mine... new analysis of Einstein's brain by Canadian scientists, reported in the current Lancet, reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning--two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best--was significantly larger than average and may also have had more interconnections among its cells, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively."
"Einstein's impressive insights tended to come from visual images he conjured up intuitively, then translated into the language of mathematics (the theory of special relativity, for example, was triggered by his musings on what it would be like to ride through space on a beam of light)"
- ". ..the brain got to McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ont., is equally fascinating. When Einstein died of a ruptured abdominal aneurysm in 1955, at the age of 76, the pathologist who did the autopsy at Princeton Hospital, Dr. Thomas Harvey, removed the brain, pickled it in formaldehyde--and kept it. Harvey had no credentials in neuroscience, and his unauthorized appropriation of Einstein's brain appalled and outraged many scientists. Possession was evidently a point in his favor, though. At the pathologist's request, the family agreed he could keep the organ for scientific study. But over the next four decades Harvey, who now lives in Lawrence, Kans., doled out little in the way of either published findings or bits of brain for others to examine. For a while, according to several reports, he stored the thing behind a cooler in his office."
" Finally, in 1996, Harvey gave much of his data and a significant fraction of the tissue itself to Dr. Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist who maintains a "brain bank" at McMaster for comparative studies of brain structure and function. These normal, undiseased brains, willed to science by people whose intelligence had been carefully measured before death, gave Witelson a solid set of benchmarks against which to measure the seat of Einstein's brilliant thoughts. To make the comparison as valid as possible, Witelson and her team compared Einstein's tissues with those of men close to his age."
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