[0:06]We have just a little time left. I'd like to ask you to summarize what again were the findings that made Einstein's brain extraordinary. Okay. Um two things, it's not bigger. Okay, it's 1,230 grams, which is not average. It might even be a little less than average for a 76-year-old guy, let's call it average though. So not a bigger brain, you can't, you can't go with that. Um the anatomy is pretty subtle stuff, but if you're talking about the game highlights, number one, every lobe, if you and not so much in my book, although I try to teach you a little neuroanatomy, but if you read the original anatomical paper we wrote, 24 pages, you'll you'll get it in very laborious detail that every lobe of his brain on the surface is different than those of of the standard normative human anatomy as portrayed in the atlases of Connelly and Ono, which we have no other ones to go with. John Connelly? No, uh, he was, he was a Jesuit at at at Georgetown or G.W. and he wrote this book in the 50s. Um, so it was different. And and Dean Falk, who went through, identified every sulcus, that's a groove, every bump, every ridge, gyrus. There's some that are not even on the atlases, they're just little fishers and no one really knows why. But if you're going to say, give me, give me the, what's the short short answer, the short stuff on it is, not bigger. The frontal lobes, he's got an extra mid-frontal gyrus. You and I have, probably three mid-frontal gyri, he had four. Yeah, I know, I, okay, thank you. He had four. Okay. Um, there were um certain differences in the parietal lobes. So Sandra Witelson did say the parietal lobes were exceptional, and we agreed with that. But again, if you're a neuroanatomist, it was different than her findings. There's something called opercula, if you think of your eyelid, think of that as an opercula, opercula means lid in Latin. And so, think of your eyelid covering your eyeball, well, the eyelid acts as an opercula. Well, Einstein had them. Witelson said, no, he didn't. And you say, well, how do you figure that out? The way you figure it out, again, if you read the book, or the paper, is that you should have an in a discontinuity between one of the gyrus, the Sylvian gyrus, as it goes up to the postcentral gyrus. And I'm I'm sorry, it's hard to describe this, you got to look at the pictures, but Falk was able to see that if you look deep into the gyrus, I'm sorry, into the sulcus. Sulcus, sulcus is like a a groove. She says there is a hidden gyrus at the at the at the base of this sulcus. It interrupts it and therefore he had opercula.
[3:48]So how did we do that? I mean, it it's not like we can leap tall buildings in a single bound. What we had that Witelson didn't have as far as we know, we had all those extra photographs. So when we go down to NMHM and eight hours and we're taking those pictures, we have lots of other perspectives on the brain, certain different angles. So if you look at a sulcus head on and then you look at it at a slight angle, a slight turn, which is Harvey took many, many pictures. Now you can actually see something at at the base of that sulcus and Falk was able to see those. It it's like a and the again, the metaphor I use is like I love the Grand Canyon, my wife and I go to the Grand Canyon. But if you're if you're standing away from the rim, you don't know there's any Colorado River. You you got to get very close to the rim in a certain angle, then you see way down in the canyon, the Colorado River. And that's what Falk did. It was like she got the angle to see where the where at the base at the base of the sulcus. So with those kind of things, she goes, oh, there's a hidden gyrus, it's not continuous, opercula. Now, what does that got to do with the price of eggs? You can't say anything except to say, well, that brain is different. And it's different than what what Witelson said. We do have common ground though in saying the parietal lobe was different was different. And if if you're going to bet on gross anatomy, if you say, well, if I had to pick out a spot in your head, your brain that has something to do with the genius, you would look at association cortex. You wouldn't be looking at auditory cortex, cerebellum. No. You'd be looking at the frontal lobe, which has executive function and that kind of judgment, that kind of stuff, or metacognition, the theory of mind, all these things that we think the frontal lobe does, which are so easy to do and so hard to explain. But the frontal lobe, and you'd look at the parietal lobe, which is kind of a a common meeting ground of visuals, somatosensory, uh, they're all kind of coming together in the parietal lobe. So that's where you're going to look. And Witelson, you know, went with the idea saying, well, look, he's parietal lobe's different. So that's why he's a genius. We're going, well, don't cut it off at the parietal lobe, there's lots of other stuff. I I would love to know her thoughts on that, you know, she's the book's been out and we've tried to contact her, but she's never really told us more. Well, well, it is it's it's an extraordinary book, this book that Dr. Lepore wrote. And there's a great deal of neuroanatomy you can learn from this book. I learned a great deal from it. Um, whatever happened to the to the picture that was painted of Einstein's brain? I've heard about it. I've never seen it. I know, you are right. Harvey mentions it. Also, are there any color photos of the brain that he took? He said he took color photos of him.
[7:54]You know, I don't think I don't think it was in his in his cellar, but you know, he probably gave stuff away, lost track of, yeah. We don't know.
[8:08]It's a really, really fascinating story. I don't think we know the whole story either yet. And his brain wasn't compared to other genius brains either, that would be interesting to do. Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the soft white underbelly of this kind of stuff is it's an end of one. It's a one-off brain. You go, well, I mean, I can tell you, well, well, look at the atlas, but you at the end of the day, you got one brain. Yes. Now, you'd have to pick out some pretty high-flying intellects. I mean, you know, I've, you know, you think you can't get Newton, you can't get Galileo, you can't get Darwin, you can't even get Turing, things like that. Stephen Hawkins, I don't know. Hawking would be fantastic, except you know he's got motor neuron disease, and that would affect it. He'd he'd lose some cortical neurons, so he even that one would be. Although, I mean, any if you could have a genius in the sciences and a genius in the arts and and, you know, and it doesn't necessarily mean you have to kind of indulge in some kind of ghoulish thing saying, well, after I'm gone, please do this to me. You know, we're at the point where with the MRI the MRIs you and I see of the brain, well, they're diagnostic, they're medical ones. Okay, yeah, okay, I see the stroke there. Okay, but there are uh programs they can actually create 3D images of the brain that might lend itself to this kind of work, not as good as a photograph of an actual specimen. But then you have to have someone who gets the funding to say, okay, I'm going to get some very smart people and we're going to do uh, a VIZO, I think that's the program that that that it's a special program, you can't have it done at your friendly neighborhood MRI center. But and you know, you plug people into it and you start doing some comparisons, but, you know, as I keep saying, you know, genius is not a disease, so it's hard to get funding.
[11:04]Thank you. That's been fascinating. Thank you very much. Uh, this has been an extremely informative. Thank you for your contributions, Dr. Lepore, and thanks for joining us. We hope you found this HCP Live Peers and Perspective presentation to be useful, informative, and fun as well. All all of the above. Thank you.
