When a rare genius like Albert Einstein comes along, scientists naturally wonder if he had something special between his ears. The latest study of Einstein's brain concludes that certain parts of it were indeed very unusual and might explain how he was able to go where no physicist had gone before when he devised the theory of relativity and other groundbreaking insights. The findings also suggest that Einstein's famedlove of music was reflected in the anatomy of his brain.
象愛因斯坦這樣的曠世奇才出現的時候，科學家們理所當然地想知道其大腦是否有些不同尋常之處。對愛因斯坦大腦的最新研究得出結論：愛因斯坦大腦的某些特定的區域的確非常特別，這也許可以解釋當提出相對論和其他突破性見解的時候，他何以能夠研究到其他任何物理學家都不曾涉足的領域。這些發現還表明，愛因斯坦對音樂的酷愛在其大腦的結構上有所體現。
When Einstein died in 1955 at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey, his brain was removed by a local pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who preserved, photographed, and measured it. A colleague of Harvey's cut most of the brain into 240 blocks and mounted them on microscope slides. From time to time, he sent the slides to various researchers, although few publications resulted. Harvey, who moved around the United States several times in the course of his career, kept the jar containing what remained of the brain in cardboard box. Finally, in 1998, Harvey--who died in 2007--gave the jar to the University Medical Center of Princeton, where it remains today.
1955年，愛因斯坦逝世於新澤西州普林斯頓醫院之後，他的大腦被一個叫做託馬斯·哈維的病理學家摘除。哈維保存了愛因斯坦的大腦，為他的大腦拍了照片，並進行了測量。哈維的一個同事將大腦的一大部分切成了240個小塊，並將這些小塊放在顯微鏡載片上，然後不斷地將這些載片送給不同的研究人員，然而這一行動卻沒能帶來公開發表的研究成果。在整個生涯中，哈維在全美國遷居過好幾次，但一直用一個放在紙板盒裡的廣口瓶保存著剩餘的大腦。1998年，哈維最終將盛有大腦的廣口瓶送給普林斯頓大學醫學中心，至今仍在那裡保存。哈維於2007年去世。
The first anatomical study of Einstein's brain was published in 1999, by a team led by Sandra Witelson, a neurobiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Working from Harvey's photographs, which were all that remained of the whole brain, Witelson's team found that Einstein's parietal lobes--which are implicated in mathematical, visual, and spatial cognition--were 15% wider than normal parietal lobes. The team also found other unusual features in the parietal region, although some of these were questioned by other researchers at the time. On
有關愛因斯坦大腦結構的第一個研究成果發表於1999年，該研究是由加拿大漢密爾頓市麥克馬斯特大學的神經生物學家桑德拉·維特爾森主持的。哈維的照片是關於愛因斯坦完整大腦的唯一資料。通過這些照片，維特爾森的研究小組發現愛因斯坦的頂葉比普通人的頂葉寬出15%。頂葉跟人的數學認知、視覺認知以及空間認知能力有關。研究小組在頂葉區域還發現了其他不同尋常的特徵，可是其中一些特徵在當時遭到了其他研究人員的質疑。然而，有一個參數無法解釋愛因斯坦具有超凡的智能，那就是他大腦的重量：只有1230克，還達不到現代人類大腦的平均重量。
Now Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has taken another crack at the brain. Working from the same photographs and comparing Einstein's brain with a set of 25 previously published photographs and measurements of brains from cadavers, Falk claims to have identified a number of previously unrecognized unusual features in Einstein's brain. They include a pronounced knoblike structure in the part of the motor cortex that controls the left hand; in other studies, similar "knobs" have been associated with musical ability. (Einstein had played the violin avidly since childhood.)
現在，位於塔拉哈西市的佛羅裡達州立大學有一位人類學家名叫迪安·福爾克，她為了研究愛因斯坦的大腦，又做了一次嘗試。福爾克的研究同樣利用了愛因斯坦的大腦照片，並將這些照片與先前公開發表的一套25張大腦照片及數據進行了對比，這些大腦來自不同個體的屍首。福爾克稱，她在愛因斯坦的大腦中發現了一些以前沒有認識到的異常特徵，其中包括：在控制左手的運動皮層上發現了顯著的球狀結構；其他的研究發現，類似的球狀結構跟愛因斯坦的音樂能力相關。眾所周知，愛因斯坦自幼酷愛小提琴。
Like Witelson's team, Falk found that Einstein's parietal lobes were larger; comparing the photographs of Einstein's brain with a second previously published set of 58 control brains, Falk also identified a very rare pattern of grooves and ridges in the parietal regions of both sides of the brain that she speculates might somehow be related to Einstein's superior ability to conceptualizephysics problems. Indeed, during his lifetime, Einstein often claimed that he thought in images and sensationsrather than in words. Einstein's talent as "a synthetic thinker" may have arisen from the unusual anatomy of his parietal cortex, Falk concludes in her report in press in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience.
跟維特爾森的研究小組一樣，福爾克也發現愛因斯坦的頂葉較大。將愛因斯坦的大腦照片與另外一套已經出版的58張大腦的對照照片進行比較後，福爾克還發現，愛因斯坦的大腦兩側頂葉區域上的溝回圖案極為罕見。因此，她推測這在某種程度上跟愛因斯坦構思物理問題的超常能力有關。確實，愛因斯坦在一生中常說自己是用形象和感覺進行思維的，而不是用語言進行思維的。福爾克得出結論，愛因斯坦作為一位「綜合思想家」的才華可能來自於其頂葉皮層非同尋常的構造。福爾克將自己的報導寫進正在印刷中的《進化神經科學前沿》一書。
Yet Falk concedes that her interpretation is still hypothetical. Marc Bangert, a neuropsychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, seconds that reservation, saying, "It is very speculative, but this is what on
然而，福爾克承認自己的解釋仍然帶有假定的成分。馬普學會的人類認知和大腦科學中心位於德國萊比錫市，該中心的神經心理學家馬克·邦戈爾特贊成這種留有餘地的態度。他說：「該研究在很大程度上帶有推測的性質，然而一個研究人員利用現有的特定資料和一些舊照片也只能做到這些了。」新澤西州新布朗斯維克市羅伯特·伍德·詹森大學附屬醫院的神經學專家弗雷德裡克·勒珀爾稱：福爾克好象準確地找出了物理學家愛因斯坦大腦中的一些新特徵，運動皮層上的球狀結構跟愛因斯坦的小提琴訓練之間的相關性具有說服力，而且也很有趣。然而，勒珀爾又說：把愛因斯坦說成是一個確確實實用形象和感覺思維的「頂級天才」，讓人感到不安。他特地引用了愛因斯坦在學校時的成績作為證據：愛因斯坦在拉丁語和理科上的得分出眾，在藝術和地理上的得分卻一般。