A striking story about how Einstein’s brain was stolen and what happened to him later

Albert Einstein is a theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate in physics in 1921, one of the founders of modern theoretical physics, as well as a public figure and humanist. The personality of this person was considered one of the most famous in the 20th century, and still his surname is used as a household name for people with high mental abilities. A scientist died in Princeton (New Jersey, USA) on April 18, 1955. His body was cremated, and the funeral was very modest and without too much publicity - that was his last will. But, as was later discovered, the great physicist was not completely cremated ...

Thomas Harvey, a pathologist who performed an autopsy of his body, decided that the brain of such a genius should never be destroyed, it must be examined! Being sure that Einstein himself would have supported his actions, the doctor photographed the brain from all sides, and then carefully cut it into 240 pieces. He packed each fragment in a jar with formalin or in a colloidal film.

What was Harvey's surprise when the incident opened and he was accused of theft, and the Einstein family demanded the return of the preserved organ. The pathologist did not expect such a reaction to his actions and refused to return the brain. As a result, he was fired from his job, and later his wife left him. Until the end of his life, he worked at the factory as the most ordinary worker, but continued to carefully store the taken pictures and the brain of the scientist himself. After the death of Thomas Harvey in 2007, his family donated everything to the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

As for the relatives of Albert Einstein, they still agreed to the study. The brain of the Nobel laureate was first studied in 1984, but the results were criticized. In 1999, taking into account all the remarks, the survey was repeated and came to the conclusion that the scientist’s brain is 15 percent wider than usual, and some areas responsible for mathematical abilities are enlarged.

In 2012, anthropologist Dean Falk also became interested in the brain features of the eminent physicist. She studied Harvey's photographs, concluding that Einstein had another twist in the frontal lobe, thanks to which its owner had a good memory and planning ability. In addition to this, the corpus callosum in this case has obvious differences from most. Since it is much thicker, the transmission of information between the two hemispheres of Einstein’s brain was much more intense.

However, the psychologist from New York University Terence Hines is confident that all these studies are useless and do not say anything. In his opinion, even if you find a person with exactly the same brain as Einstein’s, it’s not at all necessary that he will turn out to be a genius, since this feature is not calculated by the physical measurement of the contents of the head.