Driving Mr Albert

"This is a fun book by a journalist, describing his adventures driving across America with pieces of Einstein’s brain in the trunk of his car. Einstein’s brain was stolen after he died by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed the autopsy and then absconded with the brain. There is a long tradition of studying the brains of geniuses, especially in the 19th century. Of course it was natural, because neuroscientists wanted to figure out what was different about the brain of a genius. The obvious thing they studied first in the 19th century was brain size. They wondered if geniuses had larger brains in the same way that athletes are brawnier. But there is the famous case of Anatole France and Ivan Turgenev, which I discuss in my book. Turgenev’s brain weighed two kilograms and Anatole France’s brain weighed one kilogram, which are both within the normal range of human brain sizes. My joke is that although they are both great writers, Anatole France is the one who got the Nobel Prize. That’s right. We need to look at more refined measures than size, such as the organisation of neurons. Maybe the variance between different kinds of intelligence has to do with the way our brains are wired. But that’s just a hypothesis. Thomas Harvey had the ambition of discovering what was different about Einstein’s brain, but he didn’t have the scientific capability to try and do it himself, so for years he tried to find partners to study it with him. Some papers have come out, but there is nothing conclusive. There’s one theory about the parietal lobe, which is the part of the brain that’s important for spatial reasoning. That area was enlarged in Einstein, and so may explain why he was so good at that type of thing. Ultimately I reject such explanations as overly simplistic. It’s a great story, though, and there’s a wonderful documentary movie about a Japanese professor’s quest to find Einstein’s brain."