Einstein's brain, or, how is intelligence created?

Einstein didn't want to be analyzed. He wanted to be cremated.

And yet, within seven and a half hours of his death, his brain was removed and preserved. Photographs were taken, parts dissected, sent around the world and preserved in jars. Why?  

We've always been curious about geniuses.

Trying work it out: what is it that makes them different?

What makes the genius, a genius?

Do you ever look at people like Albert Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, or that guy on TV who can remember hundreds of digits of pi, and think, how? How can they do the things they do? How do they think up the things they do? What is it that sets them apart?

Maybe, in the back of your mind, you’ve wondered: could I be like that?  

Or maybe you’re a skeptic. Maybe you’re thinking, it’s all talent. It’s what we're born with, and some of us are luckier than others. Of course you can’t just ‘create’ intelligence. How would you? Not out of thin air.

Except, really, all you need is your brain. That’s all any of those geniuses have. We could call it ‘nurturing’ intelligence, if you prefer. 

Intelligence is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”. This is interesting because often, we jump to the ‘knowledge’ part. Schools often teach knowledge to students without covering the most effective ways for these students to acquire and retain such knowledge. It could be argued that this isn't a problem with the schools and that they simply reflect our perception of intelligence in society: as having lots of knowledge rather than having the ability to acquire and apply it. 

The irony of this, of course, is that the ability to acquire, retain and apply knowledge is necessary for someone to remember the knowledge that they gain. To a certain extent, we have recognized this, and schools have gradually started to include study skills sessions and focus more on problem-solving skills. However, is this enough to really foster intelligence? 

Some argue that it is nowhere near enough. They argue that the key to intelligence is creativity, imagination, and that traditional, formal education limits students’ abilities to think outside the box and think for themselves.  

Daniel Tammet holds the European record for reciting the first 22, 514 decimal points of Pi. In an interview with Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer (read the interview here), he describes how, for him “numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page” because they “have form, colour, texture and so on”. Instead of crunching numbers, he says, he dances with them. However, Tammet also mentions how, at school, he “struggled to learn many of the techniques for spelling or doing sums taught in class because they did not match [his] own style of thinking”. Similarly, Einstein dropped out of school aged 15, but we all know about the possibilities he imagined and the profound discoveries he made.  

So how about a school which fosters independent thinking, creativity and thinking outside the box? 

That sounds better. Some experimental schools have done this. In fact, Socrates began the movement back around 450BC, letting students think independently and arrive at their own conclusions. Theorists like Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi also explored this idea more recently; Einstien spent a year at a Pestalozzi-inspired school and, according to this article on Wired, “later credited it with giving him the freedom to begin his first thought experiments on the theory of relativity”. 

You might say that it sounds simple enough, giving children the freedom to think, get creative, explore. You might say that if that’s really the answer to nurturing intelligence, we should have implemented it everywhere already. And you might be right. In the 1990s, Finland focused in on independent learning, reducing the elementary maths curriculum down to four pages (from about 25) and shortening the school day by an hour. Finnish students rose in international rankings massively, reaching first place among developed nations in 2003. 

Of course, it’s not easy changing the way things are done. Especially when they’ve been done one way for so long. But equally, imagine if we could convert the potential of all the children in this country into intelligence.

Imagine if we could create intelligence. 

Now, wouldn’t that be worth it? 

And what about Einstein’s Brain? It's been subject to a lot of research and speculation, and still is. Turns out preserving the brains of geniuses is nothing new. Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss’s brain was preserved, as were the brains of Russia’s Vladimir Lenin, the mathematician Sofia Kovalevshaya and the philologist and criminal, Edward H. Rulloff. Rulloff told his executioners at the gallows to hurry - he wanted to be in hell in time for dinner.