Einstein's brain was stolen after his death. Einstein's brain. Does Big Brain have high intelligence?
The brain of one of the greatest minds of the last century, Albert Einstein, has been put on public display for the first time in the United States. In '55, when he died, the pathologist actually stole the scientist's brain, paying for it with his career. However, this crime, directly according to Einstein’s theory, turned out to be very relative. If not for the theft, scientists would never have been able to find out what was going on in the thinker’s head.
The fireproof cabinet in which the brain of the famous physicist is stored is opened like a treasury with a priceless artifact - in the presence of security and before the museum opens, at 7 o'clock in the morning. The thin glass plate, on which the convolutions are so easily read, is picked up by Dr. Lucy Roark-Adams - she owns a plywood box with 46 slices of Einstein’s brain.
"You can see a lot of the brain tissue here - a very thick slice," says a neurologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
In 1970, neurologist Lucy Roark-Adams received this box as a gift from a physician who participated in Einstein's autopsy. Such rare scientific material was incredibly curious - Einstein was considered one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century, and scientists really wanted to look into his head.
The brain really turned out to be unusual - it weighs much less than the average adult male brain, the density of neurons is much higher, and the blood vessels are in excellent condition. It seems, explains Lucy Roark-Adams, that it belongs not to a pensioner, but to a young man.
"When studying slides of Albert Einstein's brain, it became apparent to me that the structure of the brain and the structure of the cells is extraordinary," admired Lucy Roark-Adams. "He was 76 when he died, but brain cells and neurons show no signs of aging. When we As we age, the cells of our body change, including neurons, this is noticeable by their special pigmentation. Its neurons are almost not colored, and I have this for mine. scientific career I’ve never seen it - it’s as if his brain belongs to a teenager.”
Einstein died in 1955 from a ruptured abdominal aorta. Pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the brain of a genius 7 hours after death, during a standard autopsy procedure, but kept it for himself. The scientist's relatives arranged loud scandal. It is presented to the general public for the first time.
“This is both an exhibition and a laboratory - it was created by the faculty to study anatomy, and we continue to provide our materials for artists, ethnographers, pathologists,” says Philadelphia Medical Museum President George Wolreich.
New features were added to the portrait of Einstein in this scientific laboratory. He remained an inquisitive young man, which is confirmed, among other things, by this naive photograph.
The pathologist who performed the autopsy - Thomas Harvey - lost his position at Princeton, his medical license and was forced to work until his death in a factory after he was caught stealing Albert Einstein's brain. But thanks to this rogue doctor, this stolen part of a genius's brain is the only one now available to scientists.
I have admired pathologists since childhood. Those who have absolutely no romanticism in their heads!
It was at the dacha dining table. I'm about four years old. I probably had fun and was babbling about something...
Andrey, don’t talk while you eat,” Aunt Mila says in a gentle metallic voice without raising her eyes (in fact, she was the first pathologist in my life). “Okay, I’m here, if you choke, I’ll pierce your throat with a knife,” her knife made an ominous somersault over the sausage, “and everything will be fine.” What if I’m not nearby?.. - Aunt stopped “opening” the sausage and pierced me with her slanted Buryat eyes.
Needless to say, after this “stabbing” I was in the presence of Aunt Mila for a long time I was afraid not only to speak, but even to cough. Well, really, what should be going through a person’s head to tell something like this to a four-year-old child who does not know about the indications for an emergency tracheotomy?! There is only one answer: a complete lack of romanticism.
All the more surprising is the case of pathologist Thomas Harvey, the doctor who stole Albert Einstein's brain.
Einstein died in Princeton Hospital from a ruptured aortic aneurysm on the night of April 18, 1955. In accordance with the wishes of the deceased, the funeral was quiet, quick and only for his own people. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered.
But in those 24 hours that separated the death and the great scientist’s turn to ashes, Thomas Harvey - either with the consent of the executor, or without it (the story is dark) - opened Einstein’s skull, separated his brain and put it in a jar of formaldehyde. By the way, the ophthalmologist of the same hospital, Henry Abrams, taking advantage of the general confusion (just imagine what was happening there that morning!), also managed to extirpate the eyes of the same corpse, later hiding them in his safe deposit box.
Thomas Harvey, however, showed much greater consciousness - he responsibly chopped up the stolen brain and recorded the material. For half a century, Einstein's brain, cut into 240 pieces, traveled across America with the romantic pathologist Thomas Harvey. Harvey hid his "charm" from prying eyes, changed his place of residence, divorced his wife, who could not accept his obsession, and secretly sought allies. Someday, he hoped, we will be able to unravel the mystery of Einstein's genius!
In the early 1980s, Mariana Diamond, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, received a jar of mayonnaise containing fragments of Einstein's brain from Harvey. Later she will publish, in which she will announce that the samples obtained show a higher ordinary people, concentration of glial cells. Glial cells are something like an insulator that hides the process of a nerve cell and therefore improves its conductivity.
The more actively a particular part of the brain is used, the more glia, theoretically, will grow in the corresponding places.
Part of Einstein's brain was obtained by Dr. Sandra Witelson from the Ontario Research Center in Canada. She concluded that there was a specific fusion of the areas of Einstein’s cerebral cortex responsible for mathematical and spatial thinking. It was in this area, according to Dr. Witelson, that the famous theory of relativity arose (it is based on a geometric - visual-spatial - understanding of gravity). Another feature of Einstein’s brain is interpreted in the same logic - a fifteen percent excess, in comparison with the average, in the size of the parietal lobes of both hemispheres.
In the late 90s, Dr. Harvey, having understood nothing of Einstein’s genius, “tired of the responsibility of storing the brain,” transferred it to the Princeton University Medical Center, where the remaining pieces are still waiting for their romantic pathologist-researchers, whom, as we can see from the example of Aunt Mila, not so much (as you understand, nothing is known about the fate of the brain of Dr. Harvey himself, who died in 2007).
Dr. Harvey's romanticism is destroyed by banal arithmetic: our brain consists of about a billion neurons that are connected to each other by a quadrillion connections (that's a one followed by fifteen zeros), and there are only 23 thousand genes in human DNA, that is, even if our entire genome was engaged exclusively in coding connections in our brains, we are already missing about a trillion genes.
Hence the conclusion: we are not born with brilliant brains (no matter what this phrase means), but we make them so.
Yes, there are individual characteristics: some of us, no matter how hard we try, will never be able to overcome the intellectual level of oligophrenia - this is approximately 1% of the population (unfortunately, unluckily), in addition, connectomics specialists have obtained quite convincing data regarding the characteristics of the brain autistics and schizophrenics - here, too, about 2-3%. Add here another, say, 5% for chromosomal diseases and erased cases of some difficult-to-verify pathology, so that there is a margin, and it’s a stretch for us to reach 10% of the population globe, whose intellectual fate significantly depends on biological factors. (On the other hand, along the line of life, old men Alzheimer and Parkinson and their fellow degenerates are approaching us, but we will put them in brackets.)
And let's return to arithmetic again, it is indicative. According to calculations by Sebastian Seung, the amount of information contained in one human connectome (these are all the connections between neurons in one brain) is approximately equal to a zettabyte, which is - hold on to your chair - 10 to the 20th power. Obviously, we are faced with a paradox, but of a different kind, because this number is equivalent to all the digital information created by humanity to date. Now let's imagine one and a half kilos of gray and white matter lying on the pathologist's table, and ask the question how something like that can fit in it? Of course, we are not talking about actual neural ensembles, but about all, theoretically and speculatively, possible combinations in which the connections of a given system may consist. Of course, only a small fraction of these combinations are carried out in reality, and even less can be attributed to the material substrate of mental activity itself. In general, going this way, hoping to discover a specific thought in the brain, is not just looking for a needle in a haystack, but a grain of sand in the vast expanses of the Universe.
Even if by some miracle we put together Albert Einstein’s brain, cut into pieces, and then restore it using a super-powerful computer (by the way, there is no such thing yet), then even in this case we will not know what connections are in this brain were responsible for the theory of relativity, and which ones, for example, for thoughts about how to scratch a heel that was itching while reading the Nobel speech (or, if we are talking about relativity, to scratch someone who was especially itchy with the same heel). In other words, even if the morphological features of the brain are important, their influence on intellectual function is negligible - it is not the morphology of connections that is important, but, as our precious Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin would say, the “functional systems” they generate, which cannot be found in a dead brain.
Yes, different brains will give us slightly different pictures of the world. Let's say that Einstein's ability for visual-spatial thinking from birth was slightly better than the hospital average. But does the length of the fingers determine the genius of a musician? And it’s not a fact that the geometric model of gravity is ideal, and most importantly, universal (at least, with the help of the same type of thinking, the same Einstein was never able to formulate a unified field theory, and he worked on it for almost forty years). It is quite possible that to solve a number of problems of the same physics, other features of the brain would be very useful. For example, Einstein said that it is impossible to solve a problem if it cannot be represented spatially. This somehow didn’t bother Niels Bohr...
A tendency towards one type of thinking or another is not surprising, but it does not guarantee anything in itself. If you, like Einstein, have a brain that is more likely ready for spatial-mathematical thinking, but you do not develop this feature, then at your post-mortem weighing the brain of an ordinary engineer, to whom your potential (but never achieved) successes were not even dreamed of.
The brain is a developing and training machine. But again, this is not the secret.
Now let's ask the pathologists to wait...
In 1956, American psychologist George Armitage Miller published his later famous article “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity to Process Information.” In essence, the entire content of this article is already reflected in its title. However, the “magic number seven” is relevant only for the so-called short-term memory - that which allows us to remember objects for half a minute after they were presented once (in this sense, the previous seven-digit telephone numbers were, for example, ideal - you pronounce it and the person writes it down, does not ask again, but adding the operator code ruined everything).
The short-term memory function is important, but it will not help us in solving mathematical problems, nor in determining the route to follow, you won’t be able to comprehend your career plans with its help and you won’t understand the meaning of life. For all these and most other goals pursued by our intellectual function, long-term memory is needed - it is necessary to remember mathematical rules, names of streets, persons and organizations, all sorts of concepts and concepts, etc. But thinking with long-term memory is also impossible: every time you perform some conscious mental act, you are taking something away from your long-term memory, and not using it all at once. At the time of solving the problem, these objects extracted from long-term memory exist in our brain using the mechanisms of working (or, as it is also called, RAM) memory.
In 2001, psychologist Nelson Cowan published his research, which, despite its simplicity, could be called revolutionary. Cowan has convincingly shown (to be fair, similar data have been published before him) that in the case of working memory, Mr. Miller’s “magic number seven” drops sharply to three or four units (and only a few of us can boast that that they think, juggling in their minds simultaneously five intellectual objects). This conclusion cannot but be surprising. Well, we know, for example, about outstanding chess players who demonstrated the wonders of simultaneous play on many boards! Or the famous players “What? Where? When?" - these intellectuals put forward dozens of versions per minute! Finally, what to do with Einstein?! It turns out that if Kovan is right, then his brilliant brain, I beg your pardon, did not have the opportunity to cross this limiting threshold - three, well, five objects that could simultaneously fit into his working memory.
I believe that many people treat with a fair amount of condescension the statement that, they say, modern man has essentially the same brain as a Cro-Magnon man or even a Neanderthal man. They doubt it, quietly giggle, but in vain: biological evolution has its own laws and cannot happen faster than it does, and tens and even hundreds of thousands of years are not a long time for it. Now imagine the simple life of a Cro-Magnon man and try to answer the question: in order to solve some urgent problem, might he need to simultaneously hold more than three or four intellectual objects in his working memory? Hunting? Digging a dugout? Painting cave walls? Making a spear with an animal bone tip? Starting a fire? Pairing? Three or four objects - the end!
It is no longer necessary and even dangerous: an increase in the number of intellectual objects that need integration would slow down the reaction rate, and the latter is much more important in Cro-Magnon times.
But if our brain is really so primitive that it is capable of counting, I beg your pardon, only up to three (a dash is five), then how, for example, did Einstein have enough of this limited optionality to make such great discoveries as STR and GTR? What's the trick here? The fact is that the intellectual successes of Homo sapiens are not at all connected with wonderful brains that came from nowhere, but with the information encoding mechanisms that are provided to us by culture. With the help of language (and a complex system of other signs), we have learned to encode information, aggregating it into massive blocks. And where a Cro-Magnon man has a piece of coal in his hand, a memory of hunting and a cave wall, a person, for example, has an understanding of the phenomenon of “entropy”, “the second law of thermodynamics” and “the idea of the irreversibility of processes in time” - not a pound of raisins.
It is this ability to “pack” large amounts of information into compressed blocks (intellectual objects) that is the secret of the success of chess grandmasters, “experts” of the crystal owl club and the same Einstein. Yes, the Cowan restriction is in effect, but the grandmaster operates in his working memory not with individual figures, but with entire game schemes - it is for this purpose that he long years chess composition skills (problems, studies, etc.) are honed. The “expert” in the same way pulls out from the depths of his long-term memory not individual facts, but strings of ideas associated with the corresponding stimulus material, and it is this skill that takes a long time to learn. Finally, let us remember the famous thought experiments of Albert Einstein, in which you will not find more than three to five objects: elevator cabin - acceleration - ball - observer, train - searchlight beam - speed of light - observer, observer No. 1 - rocket - observer No. 2 and etc.
In other words, the problem is solved not by the number of objects involved in the work of the intellectual function, but by their, so to speak, specific gravity - by how complex they are arranged within themselves.
Let me shorten the story a bit here, since the 10,000 Hour Rule is already well known to the general public, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell's charming bestseller, Geniuses and Outsiders. The rule is simple: 10,000 hours of practice (only without fools, of course) in any field - composition, drawing, creative writing, medical work, chess, figure skating, programming, etc., etc. - and you inevitably reach the highest level of skill. The question is, why does the brain need these 10,000 hours? Believe me, in order to simply learn everything you need to understand the relevant field, much less time is enough. Most of This practice is necessary so that a kind of intellectual fragments are formed in a person’s long-term memory - weighty, complex, voluminous intellectual objects (Eric Kandel received his Nobel Prize for describing the mechanics of this process).
Yes, when solving a particular professional problem, these “ten thousand hours” specialists, like any other person, will be able to simultaneously place no more than three to five objects in their working memory, but they will be so powerful that the result will be incomparably higher than any other newbie know-it-all. The power, complexity, and proportion of these intellectual objects coming into the working memory are determined by the number of connections that make up this “functional” system of intellectual function in Anokhin’s style.
Roughly speaking, for each such point - an intellectual object - this specialist could probably write a solid monograph and still would not express everything that he knows, understands, sees.
Now imagine that you, being such a specialist, are trying to comprehend some serious research problem that you have just reached - you have caught it by the tail, so to speak, have a presentiment of the correct answer, but have not yet pulled it out. Your working memory updates and processes, one after another, many intellectual objects related to the topic; you fold them, lay them out, give up something, return to something again. In the end, you settled on three or four such “monographs”, and now, keeping all this disgrace in your working memory, you need, in accordance with the task at hand, to put them - in your mind - into one, new book.
How many nuances, details and features need to be taken into account? A huge variety! After all, these objects are complex, and were not created for this task, and therefore now must be rebuilt for it. This work of the mind requires incredible tension and concentration, time and the will to truth - qualities that are so unusual for our modern culture and so lacking in it. That's why I'm inclined to believe the story that Elsa regularly checked to see if her cousin and part-time husband was walking around with his pants unbuttoned. When there is a small need, you can do it with simple automation, without being distracted from solving an intellectual problem, but in such circumstances it is easy to forget to fasten your fly.
Unfortunately, the majority of our fellow citizens rush around the information space with their trousers unbuttoned, but for a completely different reason: not because they are too focused on their intellectual function, but rather because they are no longer capable of it in principle. A full-fledged, high-quality intellectual object cannot be borrowed from TV, or indeed from any external source of information, and the total media dependence of the population, I believe, is no secret to anyone.
From the outside, we are only able to assimilate a falsification of an intellectual object - a rumor, a meme, a media virus, an ideological cliché or stamp.
The actual intellectual object cannot be assimilated or appropriated; it can only be created, independently and inside one’s own head. This is a long process when you combine many times three or four objects (small at first, but then increasingly increasing), adding them to each other, integrating them with the next batch, turning this whole nascent colossus over and over again, and again working through it, adding what -something new (and removing something), raising it to a power and spreading it along new coordinates. After all, we - almost all of us, with the exception of the 10% of the population we received at the beginning of this article - are able to form objects with high specific gravity in our brains, and only these are important for the operation of high-power intellectual function.
But it is, of course, easier to acquire counterfeits.
Fortunately, I have not yet reached my last pathologist, and, with the exception of my classmates who chose this specialization, the “extreme” pathologist for me for now (and part-time forensic expert) is a professor who taught the corresponding course for us in Military Medical Academy. Anatoly Nikiforovich (if I'm not confusing anything) was no longer young, a retired colonel - massive, even overweight, obviously of worker-peasant origin, with a small talk and an amazing military-pathoanatomical "black humor". He joked constantly and, of course, mostly at our expense.
In addition to autopsies and lectures, our so-called practical classes were devoted to solving forensic problems: we were presented with this or that “accident,” and we had to give an opinion on it. The first to raise his hand was always Igor Negoduiko, a lanky, extremely emotional Ukrainian with a nimble and quick mind. Subsequently, Igor became interested in Dianetics, dropped out of the academy and joined the Scientology sect of Ron Hubbard (those were still the days, I must admit). From where, however, he was expelled more than once for excessive zeal, but then they were taken back. Rumor has it that our Negoduiko has now emigrated and become a big shot in the Dianetic pyramid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s currently sorting things out with Tom Cruise.
Indignant?! - Anatoly Nikiforovich was surprised every time, watching how he, as soon as the question was asked, jumped out of his seat.
What?! - Negoduiko was surprised in response.
“No way,” the professor mimicked him. - Did I tell you that all geniuses are slow-witted?
We talked, and so what?.. I know what!
“You don’t know what,” Anatoly Nikiforovich frowned, “sit down.” Two.
What's two for?!
But think about it!
Pathologists and forensic experts have an amazing medical specialty: they do not treat, but only investigate - scrupulously, carefully, fact by fact. Their work is reminiscent of the work of a detective reconstructing the picture of an incident from to the smallest details. They are virtuosos in solving puzzles: how did the “blunt object” move that broke the victim’s skull, what place in the car was the deceased before the car fell into a two-hundred-meter abyss, why did this fighter have a “crossbow” and not a “combat wound” and so on further, further, further. They are devoid of any romanticism, because, unlike any other doctor, they always find out the only correct answer (I don’t know what’s wrong with Last Judgment, but you can’t escape the justice of the pathological court).
However, the true happiness of a pathologist is that he can afford to be slow-witted: he always has time to solve a problem. Yes, Anatoly Nikiforovich, like a real pathologist, did not have any romanticism in his head at all (if he had known about Dr. Harvey’s act, I think he would have been rolling on the floor with laughter). And although the old professor never told us why “all geniuses are slow-witted,” I firmly remembered this main and extremely important lesson of his.
Elsa said that Einstein, lost in his thoughts, wandered around the apartment, completely not noticing her. He could go into the study, then suddenly return, go up to the piano, thoughtfully play a few notes and retire to the study again. His relative David Maryanov recalled that dinner in the house began with Elsa tearing her husband away from work with difficulty and in a demanding tone. Einstein appeared in the dining room, deep in thought, muttering something under his breath in protest. A plate of soup was placed in front of him, which he emptied with rhythmic mechanical movements. He could go out into the rain without a raincoat or hat, then return and stand motionless on the stairs for a long time. The scientist's Berlin friend Janos Plesch recalled one very revealing family scandal: Einstein returned from a week-long trip to a conference, but the things in his suitcase turned out to be clean, folded by a neat female hand. Elsa, understandably, demanded an explanation, not realizing that this caring hand was her own. Einstein never opened the suitcase she had packed: he was busy and thinking.
Could this work be found in Einstein's stolen brain? And was it necessary to steal the brain of this sweet, albeit slightly extravagant old man so quickly, if in order to understand the mechanics of his genius, the same thing is enough - just think about it carefully?
