Einstein's Brain Reveals Clues to Genius

[Little Star]

Live Science
Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 19 November 2012

Einstein's brain had extraordinary folding patterns in several regions, which may help explain his genius, newly uncovered photographs suggest.

The photographs, published Nov. 16 in the journal Brain, reveal that the brilliant physicist had extra folding in his brain's gray matter, the site of conscious thinking. In particular, the frontal lobes, regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had unusually elaborate folding, analysis suggests.

"It's a really sophisticated part of the human brain," said Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, referring to gray matter. "And [Einstein's] is extraordinary."

http://www.livescience.com/24896-einstein-amazing-brain-photos.html

[Jim__]

1. And brain folding does seem to be connected to thinking capacity.

Some info from the internet ( http://www.brainhealthandpuzzles.com/human_brain_folds.html ):

To understand the folds we need to revisit the Cortex, the outer layer of the brain. That's where most of the actual 'thinking' takes place in our brains. The cortex is only on the surface and only about 3.4mm thick. So to maximize the amount of surface area in a relatively fixed space, we've evolved brains whose surface is folded.

[Warpy]

2. I read that when I was a kid, that his brain was folded and convoluted

much more than brains of people who weren't groundbreaking theoretical physicists. The same article stated that women's brains were more deeply convoluted than men's. Don't make the bad joke about those convolutions leading to convoluted logic, I've heard it before. What they do is even up the difference in weight between male and female brains.

The difference now is that various areas of the brain have been mapped according to function, so they're beginning to understand what the deepest folding did and why.