Seeking to physically get a glimpse at how Albert Einstein's brain must have looked like, Florida State University (FSU) Paleoanthropologist Dean Falk recreated it using a technique commonly employed in analyzing ancient fossils. It would appear, she said, that at least on the surface, the eminent scientist's brain was fairly different from the average one, sporting billions of neurons and extremely large numbers of synapses connecting the brain cells.
“Einstein's brain is really unusual. On the surface at least, it looks different than others. It's suggestive,” Falk explained. She added that the scientist had over 25 billion neurons, connected to each other through billions of synapses, which created slight abnormalities on the surface of the cortex. At least in theory, this wiring of the brain might have been one of the things that allowed one of the greatest minds in the world to come up with completely new ways of looking at physics, and of inferring the hidden laws behind daily phenomena such as gravity and light.
According to the researcher, Einstein had approximately 93,000 miles (150,000 kilometers) of insulated nervous fibers in his brain, through which electrical impulses constantly raced at more than 200 miles per hour,
The Wall Street Journal reports. Falk noticed from about 25 autopsy photos of the researcher's brain that Einstein had highly complex patterns of grooves and ridges on his cortices, especially around the parietal lobes, which are usually associated with mathematical, visual and spatial cognition. “A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” the physicist told at one point, trying to explain how his mind worked.
“I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes and I may try to express it in words afterwards. (...)I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of signs and, furthermore, largely unconsciously,” she shared about the way she envisioned problems, as well as their solutions. Numerous studies were conducted over time on the brains of influential personalities of the world, such as Vladimir Lenin, Anatole France, and Ivan Turgenev. In all cases, results were inconclusive.
Some argue that this lack of results may be due to the fact that scientists have been looking in the wrong places for the traits that determine a certain skill. They say that our own individual abilities may actually come from the intricate patterns that neurons and synapses form inside each of our brains, rather than from a certain, overdeveloped brain area.
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