AFTER ALBERT EINSTEIN’S death in 1955, a Princeton Hospital pathologist by the name of Thomas Harvey decided he wanted a closer look at the brain of a genius. The fact he failed to ask the family’s permission and then refused to return his prize cost him his job.
For years after that, Harvey kept Albert Einstein’s brain in a jar. From time to time he offered slices of it to researchers. Many theories were offered from studies of these samples as to what made Einstein the genius he was. One famous study conducted by Sandra Witelson of McMaster University found that Einstein’s brain lacked a “wrinkle” called the Sylvian fissure. From that she hypothesized the Noble Prize winner had a brain in which its neurons were freer to communicate with each other.
In a scene fitting a Dean Koontz novel, Harvey and a freelance writer by the name of Michael Paterniti decided to drive cross country to meet Einstein’s granddaughter. The two made the trip from New Jersey to California with the brain of the smartest man of the century bobbing around in a Tupperware bowl in the trunk of a Buick Skylark. You can read about that odd adventure in Paterniti’s book, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain.
At the age of 85, Thomas Harvey could stand the responsibility of guarding Einstein’s brain no longer. He wrote, “Eventually, you get tired of the responsibility of having it.”
As readers, we are somewhat like Thomas Harvey; we are allowed to ride along through life with writers’ brains and a bit of their souls in our own kind of Tupperware bowls. They’re called books, and Kindles and Nooks. We are allowed the privilege of becoming a part of their imaginations. Sometimes the experience is enlightening. Sometimes entertaining. Sometimes exasperating.
Regardless of the outcome, it’s a magical thing to hold someone else’s brain in your hands.
