The corpus callosum of Albert Einstein‘s brain: another clue to his high intelligence?

Authors:
Open Access
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Sir, Albert Einstein was arguably the greatest physicist in the 20th century and his extraordinary intelligence has long intrigued both scientists and the general public. Despite several studies that focused mainly on the histological and morphological features of Einstein’s brain after his death, the substrates of Einstein’s genius are still a mystery (Diamond et al., 1985; Anderson and Harvey, 1996; Kigar et al., 1997; Hines, 1998; Witelson et al., 1999a, b; Colombo et al., 2006; Falk, 2009). Recently, Falk et al. (2013) analysed 14 newly discovered photographs and found that Einstein’s brain had an extraordinary prefrontal cortex, and that inferior portions of the primary somatosensory and motor cortices were greatly expanded in the left hemisphere. Among these 14 images were photographs of the left and right medial surface of Einstein’s brain, on which the corpus callosum was shown with great resolution and accuracy. The corpus callosum is the largest nerve fibre bundle that connects the cortical regions of the cerebral hemispheres in human brains and it plays an essential role in the integration of information transferred between the hemispheres over thousands of axons (Aboitiz et al., 1992). The two photographs of the medial surfaces of Einstein’s cerebral hemispheres provide the basis for the present study.

This publication has 33 references indexed in Scilit: