After Albert Einstein died in 1955, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey removed Einstein’s brain, photographed it with great care, cut it up into 240 blocks, sliced some of those blocks into slides, and prepared a roadmap to help future scientists navigate the pieces. Slides and photographs were distributed to researchers, but many have since been lost.

Dean Falk, a senior scholar at Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research, has spent years studying the photographs of Einstein’s brain and is the lead author of a new study, published in the journal Brain, that relies on a collection of rarely seen photographs to analyze it.

Falk’s team compared Einstein’s brain with those of 85 other humans already described in the scientific literature and found that the great physicist did indeed have something special between his ears. Although the brain, weighing 1230 grams, is only average in size, several regions feature additional convolutions and folds rarely seen in other subjects. For example, the regions on the left side of the brain that facilitate sensory inputs into, and motor control of, the face and tongue are much larger than normal; and his prefrontal cortex—linked to planning, focused attention, and perseverance in the face of challenges—is also greatly expanded.

The key takeaway: Einstein’s brain was normal sized, but had a lot more convolutions than that of the average human brain (on record).

Photographs of Einstein’s brain.

The link to the full paper is here.

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(via Washington Post)