Einsteins brain

Where do you seek the genius of a man who changed modern physics with a simple equation? Would you seek it in his papers,the extensive archives that let you into Brownian motion and unified field theories,or would you go on a rather weird but more anatomical quest in the quantum of his brain,the grooves of its hemispheres and the cellular geography of the grey matter? On Albert Einstein and his brilliance,the world can be broadly divided into physicists and fetishists. And they are both busy. While scientists are blasting tiny neutrinos down a tunnel that stretches from Switzerland to Italy,to see if they can travel faster than light and upend Einsteins universe,super thin slivers of his brain are being displayed for the first time in a museum in the US.

The fetishisation of the Einstein brain began after pathologist Thomas Harvey,who conducted the autopsy in 1955,removed it surreptitiously,dunked it in two jars,periodically despatched portions to neuroscientists and turned it into a most fascinating medical specimen. And many have claimed their eureka moments like the Ontario scientists who said in a Lancet study in the late 1990s that the absence of a parietal operculum,and a particular enlarged fissure were pointers to the superlative intelligence while others have been quick to question the very same findings.

Anatomical parts of extraordinary people have been treated like holy relics,like Lenins brain that became part of a Soviet study and Galileos fingers kept in a Florence museum. Cytoarchaeology may or may not provide some fascinating details about Einstein,but it is a no-brainer that his extraordinary mind was more than a sum of his brains parts. As he himself warned,We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has,of course,powerful muscles,but no personality.