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翻译/胡德良 编辑/蒋世禄
Closer Look at Einstein's Brain
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.
象爱因斯坦这样的旷世奇才出现的时候，科学家们理所当然地想知道其大脑是否有些不同寻常之处。对爱因斯坦大脑的最新研究得出结论：爱因斯坦大脑的某些特定的区域的确非常特别，这也许可以解释当提出相对论和其他突破性见解的时候，他何以能够研究到其他任何物理学家都不曾涉足的领域。这些发现还表明，爱因斯坦对音乐的酷爱在其大脑的结构上有所体现。
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，爱因斯坦逝世于新泽西州普林斯顿医院之后，他的大脑被一个叫做托马斯·哈维的病理学家摘除。哈维保存了爱因斯坦的大脑，为他的大脑拍了照片，并进行了测量。哈维的一个同事将大脑的一大部分切成了240个小块，并将这些小块放在显微镜载片上，然后不断地将这些载片送给不同的研究人员，然而这一行动却没能带来公开发表的研究成果。在整个生涯中，哈维在全美国迁居过好几次，但一直用一个放在纸板盒里的广口瓶保存着剩余的大脑。1998年，哈维最终将盛有大脑的广口瓶送给普林斯顿大学医学中心，至今仍在那里保存。哈维于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. One parameter that did not explain Einstein's mental prowess, however, was the size of his brain: At 1230 grams, it fell at the low end of average for modern humans.
有关爱因斯坦大脑结构的第一个研究成果发表于1999年，该研究是由加拿大汉密尔顿市麦克马斯特大学的神经生物学家桑德拉·维特尔森主持的。哈维的照片是关于爱因斯坦完整大脑的唯一资料。通过这些照片，维特尔森的研究小组发现爱因斯坦的顶叶比普通人的顶叶宽出15%。顶叶跟人的数学认知、视觉认知以及空间认知能力有关。研究小组在顶叶区域还发现了其他不同寻常的特征，可是其中一些特征在当时遭到了其他研究人员的质疑。然而，有一个参数无法解释爱因斯坦具有超凡的智能，那就是他大脑的重量：只有1230克，还达不到现代人类大脑的平均重量。
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.)
现在，位于塔拉哈西市的佛罗里达州立大学有一位人类学家名叫迪安·福尔克，她为了研究爱因斯坦的大脑，又做了一次尝试。福尔克的研究同样利用了爱因斯坦的大脑照片，并将这些照片与先前公开发表的一套25张大脑照片及数据进行了对比，这些大脑来自不同个体的尸首。福尔克称，她在爱因斯坦的大脑中发现了一些以前没有认识到的异常特征，其中包括：在控制左手的运动皮层上发现了显著的球状结构；其他的研究发现，类似的球状结构跟爱因斯坦的音乐能力相关。众所周知，爱因斯坦自幼酷爱小提琴。
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.
跟维特尔森的研究小组一样，福尔克也发现爱因斯坦的顶叶较大。将爱因斯坦的大脑照片与另外一套已经出版的58张大脑的对照照片进行比较后，福尔克还发现，爱因斯坦的大脑两侧顶叶区域上的沟回图案极为罕见。因此，她推测这在某种程度上跟爱因斯坦构思物理问题的超常能力有关。确实，爱因斯坦在一生中常说自己是用形象和感觉进行思维的，而不是用语言进行思维的。福尔克得出结论，爱因斯坦作为一位“综合思想家”的才华可能来自于其顶叶皮层非同寻常的构造。福尔克将自己的报道写进正在印刷中的《进化神经科学前沿》一书。
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 one has to deal with given the data available, some old photographs." Frederick Lepore, a neurologist at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, says that Falk appears to have accurately identified a number of new features in the physicist's brain, and he finds the correlation between the motor cortex "knob" and Einstein's violin training to be "persuasive and intriguing." Nevertheless, Lepore says, he is "uneasy" with the suggestion that Einstein was a "parietal genius" who thought strictly in images and sensations, citing among other evidence his superior school grades in Latin and the sciences and mediocre marks in art and geography.
然而，福尔克承认自己的解释仍然带有假定的成分。马普学会的人类认知和大脑科学中心位于德国莱比锡市，该中心的神经心理学家马克·邦戈尔特赞成这种留有余地的态度。他说：“该研究在很大程度上带有推测的性质，然而一个研究人员利用现有的特定资料和一些旧照片也只能做到这些了。”新泽西州新布朗斯维克市罗伯特·伍德·约翰逊大学附属医院的神经学专家弗雷德里克·勒珀尔称：福尔克好象准确地找出了物理学家爱因斯坦大脑中的一些新特征，运动皮层上的球状结构跟爱因斯坦的小提琴训练之间的相关性具有说服力，而且也很有趣。然而，勒珀尔又说：把爱因斯坦说成是一个确确实实用形象和感觉思维的“顶级天才”，让人感到不安。他特地引用了爱因斯坦在学校时的成绩作为证据：爱因斯坦在拉丁语和理科上的得分出众，在艺术和地理上的得分却一般。
文章来源/网易博客/美国《科学》杂志网
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