Regarding the recent study of Einstein's brain in Brain journal. I asked a comrade at the Harvard Medical School. He wrote me this:
"Re Einstein's brain, there has been a fetish about Einstein's brain since his death. Essentially, it is a variation of the concept of brain size as it relates to mental capacity. There has been a whole school of thought built on the concept that white men have bigger brains than women or African subjects. Brain size issue is a very complicated concept, and ultimately to my mind is not a very meaningful one when you are comparing your average person to a gifted one. Still, the claim has been made that the parietal lobe, a part of the brain involved in memory, is larger than average. The new study implicates a large corpus callosum, a region that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. You are correct to point out that the sample is too small. Absent some ways to computer model the impact of such increased corpus callosum size, we are left with little to build on. In the end, there is a stronger argument to make that what matters is the number of connections between distinct neuronal groups (synapses), and hence the number and connectivity of neuronal circuits, rather than gross changes in the size of the brain. The corpus callosum study implicitly recognizes that.
"Re Einstein's brain, there has been a fetish about Einstein's brain since his death. Essentially, it is a variation of the concept of brain size as it relates to mental capacity. There has been a whole school of thought built on the concept that white men have bigger brains than women or African subjects. Brain size issue is a very complicated concept, and ultimately to my mind is not a very meaningful one when you are comparing your average person to a gifted one. Still, the claim has been made that the parietal lobe, a part of the brain involved in memory, is larger than average. The new study implicates a large corpus callosum, a region that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. You are correct to point out that the sample is too small. Absent some ways to computer model the impact of such increased corpus callosum size, we are left with little to build on. In the end, there is a stronger argument to make that what matters is the number of connections between distinct neuronal groups (synapses), and hence the number and connectivity of neuronal circuits, rather than gross changes in the size of the brain. The corpus callosum study implicitly recognizes that.
"There
is another aspect to the story of Einstein's brain that one needs to be wary
of. There are many Jews who earnestly believe that there is something genetically
special about Jewish genius. After all, the claim goes, look at how many
Nobel prize winners are Jewish, so there must be something heritable about it.
One can easily deflate such claims by pointing out to the special cultural attributes
of Jewish populations in the West that have made such achievements possible.
Nevertheless, a claim of the physical uniqueness of Einstein's
brain can morph into a proposition of unique genetic attributes of Jewish
ethnicity. One has to be careful to side step such nonsense. "
