Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 23 of 91
Einstein had a fairly average brain
What did they discover? The most surprising finding was that there was nothing surprising. Einstein had a fairly average brain. The organ had a standard internal architecture, with a few structural anomalies. The regions responsible for visuospatial cognition and math processing were a bit larger, 15 percent fatter than average. He was also missing some sections that less agile brains possess, accompanied with a few more glial cells than most people carry (glial cells help give the brain its structure and assist with information processing). None of these results are very instructive, unfortunately. Most brains possess structural abnormalities: some regions more shrunken than others, some more swollen. Because of this individuality, it is currently impossible to demonstrate that certain physical differences in brain structure lead to genius. Einstein’s brain certainly was smart, but not one of its dice-sized pieces would definitively tell us why.