Stuff You Should Know - How Albert Einstein's Brain Worked

Episode Date: November 25, 2008

Albert Einstein is one of the world's most recognizable geniuses. But was his brain any different from that of an average person? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about Thomas Harvey, the man who set out to decipher Einstein's brain. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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region that attracts monsters and paranormal activity. There's something beyond our understanding going on here. Starring Supernatural's Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Ponzio, and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk, written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Aaron Mankey. Listen to Bridgewater on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I've got a big brain. Chuck has a big brain. Mine is smaller than yours. That's true. You know who had an average size brain?

I do. Who? Albert Einstein. Fantastic. So we've got her segue. Let's talk about Einstein's brain, Chuck. That's a good idea. I'll start, apparently. All right, you ready? Yeah. Einstein was very well aware of his renown, right? I don't think he may have been a hyperintelligent person, but I don't think he had a big head. But he was aware of the kind of cult of personality that the world loves. Right, yeah. He was aware of his own fame. Yeah, and he didn't want to end up just some venerated saint of mathematics. So he asked that his body be cremated upon his death. In 1955? Yeah, April 18, 1955, the day, the year, the earth stood still. And he said specifically he didn't want people to come worship at his bones.

Yeah, I was kind of taking it. I thought that sounded a little cocky, but a little. But again, yeah, I don't think he was a very cocky fellow. I don't want people to worship at my bones either. So yeah, something we have in common. I could live with that, actually. You could. Yeah, that'd be fine. You want people to worship at your bones. Kind of. Yeah. So Einstein's wish was 98% fulfilled if we're speaking weight wise, because the brain actually makes up about 2% of the body weight on average. So it sounds to me like you're saying he's buried without his brain. Yes, he was, my friend. Did you know that? I did. Of course you did. So Chuck, this guy who was, as far as I could tell, a pretty standard pathologist working at Princeton University's

hospital was charged with doing the autopsy on Einstein. And I guess he was kind of struck with this moment of inspiration, where he realized that he was holding Einstein's brain. Right. And that surely this brain had some sort of secrets to value to be studied. Yes. Yeah, there had to be something here. This guy, I mean, Einstein was just as big as it gets. He, you know, so many other physicists had come before him and had gotten all of their genius out very early on. Newton did it. And Einstein did it to a certain extent, but he also did continue working longer than was average. Right. And this guy just wanted, no, he just couldn't bring himself to cremating the brain of the smartest man of the 20th century. Right. I might have been with

him there. Thomas Harvey stole Einstein's brain. No one can sue us for that because it really happened. Oh, it did. It did. So Harvey basically takes Einstein's brain, I imagine throws it in some formaldehyde in a jar and holds it hostage until he gets permission from one of Einstein's sons to study it. Right. I saw a head in a bucket once. Tell me about it. Did I ever tell you that story? Little sidebar. Yeah, it was when I was working in the film industry in Los Angeles and I was doing some work at, I guess I won't mention the hospital. They might not, might frown upon hearing this broadcast, but a hospital in LA, we were doing a job there. And one of the researchers pulled me aside and said, Hey, man, you want to see a head in a bucket? And I said, Yeah, I'd love

to see a head in a bucket. No doubt. Took me in a room, brought out a bucket and it had this, you know, elderly man's head floating in it. And it wasn't in a glass jar. It was an open bucket with no lid. And I looked down into it to this head. Was he looking up at you? No, he wasn't. That is the most amazing thing that anyone I know is ever done. Just want to get that out there. That is very, very surreal. That's, yeah, I'll bet it was slightly distorted. It doesn't haunt me, but I can picture it in my mind's eye still. And that was, you know, probably five years ago. Easy. How does he look in milky eyes? He looked like an old guy with, you know, without a body. Yeah. In a, in a bucket. Wow. Wow. Okay. Sorry for that sidebar. I thought that was

everybody else's idea. Okay. Well, cutting Harvey's brain doesn't seem nearly as cool. Right. Well, I guess we'll just talk about it anyway. Right. Yeah, let's do. So, Harvey's got Einstein's brain in a glass jar and now he's secured permission to study it. Yep. So, he cuts it into like 240 pieces as far as I understand. Yeah, 240. And he encases them all. He preserves them in celloid. Right. Well, he weighed it first. First, he did a few measurements just to make sure. Right. And photographed. You're right. Yeah. And heavily photographed just to make sure that there was nothing that stood out and nothing did. It weighed about the same as any other brain. He also, I think, did a study first of the brain cells.

Uh-huh. They were, they were average size. There was an average amount of, by all rights, Einstein's brain looked pretty average. Exactly. But, you know, Harvey quickly became obsessed with the notion that Einstein's brain was not average, that there was something fundamentally different about it. Right. That we could point to. And who knows? I mean, maybe if we can figure out how Einstein's brain was different, we can start, you know, borrowing geniuses or something like that. So, Harvey cuts this thing into pieces after he's catalogued it and documented it. And he starts sending it to researchers whose work he finds interesting. These are people around the world and each one, I imagine, was contacted first. I don't think they just got a piece of

Einstein's brain in the mail and they're like, what the hell is this? You know. Right. So, he'd contact them and say, I think your work's interesting. I've got Einstein's brain. I want to send you some pieces to study and compare it using your, the view of your work. Yeah. I bet he didn't get a lot of people that declined that opportunity. No, I wouldn't think so. I bet he got 100% rate. Yeah. So, he's expecting very quickly that Einstein's brain is going to give up its secrets. And the waiting game began. It didn't. We have still to this day, I'm going to go ahead and cut to the end the big finish. We're still not entirely certain how, how Einstein's brain worked. Right. But yeah, we'll get to that in a minute.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. There is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe. On the new podcast, The Turning, Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balanchine. There are not very many of us that actually grew up with Balanchine. It was like I grew up with Mozart. He could do no wrong. Like he was a god. But what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life?

Were the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy and often crossed? He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you. Only I can see you. Most people in the ballet world are more interested in their experience of watching it than in the dancers' experience of executing it. Listen to The Turning, Room of Mirrors on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Harvey under this obsession basically turns into something of a weirdo actually. Kind of the Howard Hughes of pathology. Of brain savers? Yeah, every once in a while a reporter would look him up because he basically just disappeared with the brain. And one guy found him living in Kansas and the brain was in a jar

in an old cider box behind a beer cooler. So this guy, Harvey's probably taking orders from his cats and Einstein's brain is just sitting there chilling waiting to be studied again. Yeah. Finally, 30 years after Einstein's brain is stolen by Harvey, he finds out about the work of this woman named Dr. Marion Diamond. You want to talk about Dr. Diamond, Chuck? Right. Dr. Diamond worked at Cal Berkeley and studied the plasticity of the brain of rat's brains. And she's always the rat. It is. It feels really bad for the rat. I don't. I don't. She found out that rats that had more enriching environments had more robust brains. Specifically, the glial, G-L-I-A-L, is someone pronouncing it, glial cells?

You are, yes. Is that correct? Yeah, you're right. No, neurosurgeon. I think it's glial. Yeah, we'll call it glial cells. So they had more glial cells in relation to their other neurons. And so she thought, let me take a look at Einstein's brain and see if the same thing holds. Now, glial cells are basically, they clean up these potassium ions. Potassium is actually discharged by a neuron when it fires, right? So after time, the potassium kind of builds up. It's a waste product. And if it builds up enough and neuron can't fire properly, it shuts down. Right. If you have enough glial cells to keep the neurons clean, then they should be able to fire properly. And by logic, the more glial

cells you have, the smarter you should be because the cleaner your neurons are. Exactly. And this is actually what she found was that Einstein had a higher ratio of glial cells to other neurons. And she basically hypothesized that this means that he had more rapidly firing neurons than other people. However, past and answered. Not quite answered because she wasn't exactly comparing against like brains. Einstein was older than the other brains. And glial cells divide over the course of your life. Right. So Einstein was what, 76 when he died. And she was comparing the average age of the brain that she was comparing Einstein's brain to is 64. Right. So that right there is terrible methodology. That's not the end of it. That's not the end of

it. So in theory, he would have more glial cells just because he's 12 years older than these other brains. And she didn't take into account IQ score either. Well, she didn't even know whose brains these were as far as I know. Exactly. So she had no idea what kind of brain intelligence level that she was comparing Einstein to. And even worse than that, apparently there's 28 ways to measure glial cells. And she threw out any measurement that didn't support her hypothesis. So I don't understand how this woman had funding. Yes. She was at UC Berkeley too. I mean, she wasn't at, you know, like the Mexico city upstairs medical clinic. This is like what I did in my seventh grade science fair project. If the results study glial cells, well, no, but if the

study, if whatever I was doing, if the results didn't match up, I just didn't use them. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah, that is that's seventh grade science fair project stuff. Yeah. So basically throw that out of the water. Yeah, this, this comes out and Harvey, I imagine is a little dismayed by this. And I probably ruined Dr. Diamond's career. Yeah, probably. But Harvey was a very patient, obsessed man, as we've said, and he continued to wait. And then finally, about 10 years after the diamond thing, and this was hullabaloo, I mean, this is huge, like it was touted in newspapers all over the place news media. Everybody was like, we've got Einstein's brain figured out. And then it came out like

her methodology wasn't holding up. So, you know, there's a real high and then, you know, there's an equal low. And then about 10 years after that, another woman's work, this, this woman's name was Dr. Sandra Whittleson. Um, Britt Anderson. No, Britt Anderson turned Harvey onto Whittleson's work. Okay, I'm sorry, Britt Anderson, just for the second time, I cut you out of the podcast. I wanted to mention you. Yeah, there's a guy named Britt Anderson at University of Alabama, right? Yeah, you go ahead with Britt Anderson, right? Well, Britt was studying the size of men and women's brains or in the differences. And yeah, you're right. He turned him on to this other doctor. So right, whose name was Dr. Sandra Whittleson. She's at McMaster's

University in Ontario, our fair neighbor to the north. And she basically, she had a bunch of brains. Yeah, a nice collection of like brains. And she had data on all of them. Yeah, she knew whether the people were insane. She knew what their IQs were. Um, she, she had a lot. Yeah, she had a lot of good data and some good brains to study to compare Einstein's brain to the war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds tomorrow. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And on the prime example, okay.

The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. There is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe. On the new podcast, the turning room of mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most

influential figure, George Balanchine. There are not very many of us that actually grew up with Balanchine. It was like I grew up with Mozart. He could do no wrong. Like he was a god. But what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life where the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy and often crossed. He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you. Only I can see you. Most people in the ballet world are more interested in their experience of watching it than in a dancer's experience of executing it. Listen to the turning room of mirrors on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. And actually, she had quite a breakthrough. She did. There's this thing called

the Sylvium Fisher and it separates your parietal lobe. Your parietal lobe is responsible for mathematical skills, spatial reasoning, three-dimensional visualization, all of which would come in handy for a guy like Einstein. He was pretty much the master of all those. So if the Sylvan Fisher is absent or not pronounced as Dr. Whittleson found Einstein's was, the parietal lobe would be bigger. You could pack more brain cells in there. Right. And his was 15% wider than the average brain. Yeah. Assuming we have average brains. Sure, exactly. Which is assuming a lot because neither of us have been autopsied yet.

True. So basically what Dr. Whittleson said was, okay, we now know that Einstein had a 15% wider parietal lobe than the average person. That could account for it. We don't know. Basically what she's done is set a benchmark where brain research is going to have to catch up to to either prove or disprove because we don't have the technology to say or we don't have a fundamental understanding of the brain yet to say whether that's what it was or not. But it's nice to know it's out there. Yeah, exactly. There was a difference, a physical difference. There definitely was. Dr. Whittleson basically said whenever you guys can catch up to it,

here's what's different about Einstein's brain, prove or disprove. But our esteemed colleague Molly Edmonds brought up what I thought was a very interesting point. And that is that is it dangerous to study things like physiological abnormalities. She brings up, you know, if you really look at Einstein's brain, the parietal lobe, especially with a lack of understanding of what it's exactly doing, then one could make the argument that a physician would have told Einstein's mother that her son's brain was damaged, which could have limited him for the rest of his life. He may never have become a mathematician. She may not have even put him in school.

Exactly. Why bother, you know? So I thought that was a really interesting point and one worth discussing. Right, because while Einstein also had a delayed speech development, and so coupled with that, a parent might have been concerned. Yeah. Oh, apparently he used to write his address down in his arm every day. Right. So when he inevitably get lost, he'd just kind of look and ask somebody if they could take him there. Right. He was a hell of a guy. Yeah. And just a nice little bow on the end of this gift to our listeners. The Harvey actually returned the brain before he died to Princeton Hospital, which I thought he died in 19, I'm sorry, 2007. Yeah. At the age of 94.

And he returned the brain back to Princeton. He did. He actually kind of bequeathed it to the resident pathologist at Princeton University Hospital. Right. Who basically now is shackled with this thing. Yeah. Toad it around. An extra little aside, which I thought was pretty interesting, a guy named Michael Paternity wrote a book called Driving with Mr. Albert. Michael Paternity? That's the way I took it. That's a great name. Yeah. He wrote a book called Driving with Mr. Albert, I believe. Right. Yeah. And it is about driving on one of the many cross-country trips that Harvey took with Einstein's brain. Yeah. Apparently he did it a lot. Yeah. Sounds like a movie in the works. I think so too. It's going to be Tuesday with Mori, I can tell you. Yeah.

So stick around because it is correction time. And today we have a correction for me. Yes. This is not Chuck. Actually, Chuck argued against what I said. I was right for a change. Chuck is supported by yet another person who mistakenly thinks my first name is Brian. My name is Josh. Chuck's last name is Brian. But thank you anyway, Misha Bailey. Misha Bailey pointed out in a podcast. Well, we'll play the clip. It's from how China's pollution sniffers work. Listen to this. Have you ever eaten jelly belly jelly beans? I'm not a jelly bean guy. These things are not jelly beans. All right. Anyway, if you get a bag of these things. Oh, I know what you mean. On the back, it says like, you know, two blueberry plus one,

I think, toasted marshmallow creates like the flavor of like a blueberry muffin. Right. So there's different recipes. You can come up with your own. It's very fun. Are these the ones that are kind of nasty to like they have booger and no booger that I've come across. I think you're confusing Harry Potter with reality again. As it turns out, Chuck, I was wrong. Right. Jelly belly does indeed make a booger flavored jelly bean. I knew I hadn't imagined that in some fantasy that I had. So basically, there's a special addition called bean boozled. Right. And jelly belly is going to the trouble of making identical looking jelly beans with radically different tastes like black licorice, which is bad enough.

It's also there. There's another one that looks like the black licorice one, but it's a skunk spray. Right. And specifically, there's one that's juicy pear. And in other cases, it's booger flavored booger flavored. They have 10 different flavors. Thank you, jelly belly. Yeah. And thank you, Misha Bailey for proving me wrong. Yeah. If you want to prove either one of us wrong or tell us, you know, what you think, what's on your mind. Give us what for? Perhaps you have a man crush on one or both of us. Right. You can send an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And speaking of podcast, Chuck. Yeah, I wanted to give just a quick mention to one of our other podcasts called Brain Stuff from the founder of our awesome company, Marshall Brain. Actually,

his real last name too. Yeah. He has his own podcast called Brain Stuff. And there's a really cool one up there now called What Are Hot Dogs Made From? Fascinating. So before you go to the next ballgame and wolf down that hot dog, you should listen to this. Either that or if you really want to eat a hot dog, you should probably wait until afterwards. Yeah, I would recommend that. Yeah. So you can check that out like our podcasts on iTunes. And you can learn even more about Albert Einstein's brain by typing in a combination of those words in our search bar on howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at howstuffworks.com.

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