At McGill University’s Office for Science and Society site, science communicator Joe Schwarcz looks at the curious history of Albert Einstein’s brain, removed shortly after his death in 1955. The thinking, of course, was that so brilliant a scientist must have a special type of brain.

Nothing worthy of headlines or groundbreaking neuroscience research seems to have been found so the brain ended up dissected in two jars kept by the doctor who removed it, Dr. Thomas Harvey of Princeton Memorial Hospital. Then things took a turn:

Sometime in the 1970s a reporter got wind of the Einstein brain business, tracked down Dr. Harvey and wrote an article on the weird affair. Dr. Harvey got all sorts of requests for samples, some of which he did provide to respected neuroscientists. Eventually three scientific papers were published about the brain, each one finding some differences between it and ordinary brains. There was nothing really dramatic, except for the fact that some parts of the brain had a greater density of nerve cells. Einstein’s brain weighed less than that of the average adult male, so certainly, in this part of the body, it is not size that counts!

“Einstein’s Brain,” August 21, 2025

The curious business sparked a book as well, Driving Mr. Einstein (2001) by journalist Michael Paterniti:

But then, a few years after the autopsy, Harvey was fired from his job for allegedly refusing to give up Einstein’s brain to Kauffman. In fact, Harvey had kept the brain himself, not at the hospital, but at home, and when he left Princeton he simply took it with him. Years passed. There were no studies or findings. And, in turn, no legal action was brought against Harvey, as there was no precedence in the courts for the recovery of a brain under such circumstances. And then Harvey fell off the radar screen. When he gave an occasional interview — in local newspaper articles from 1956 and 1979 and 1988 — he always repeated that he was about “a year from finishing study on the specimen.”

Four decades later, there’s still no study… – excerpt from the Publisher

Schwarcz comments, “Small or not, Einstein’s brain was spectacular. He always had a brilliant answer to a question.”

Yes. But no outstanding difference was found between Albert Einstein’s brain and that of any number of other people. Word would have leaked out by now if it had been. That’s exactly what researchers wanted to find but did not.

Think about that. Whatever made his mind unique was apparently not in his brain. That’s negative evidence (the elimination of possibilities).

What’s just as remarkable, as neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I discuss in The Immortal Mind: (Worthy, June 3, 2025), is that many people lead normal lives despite missing large parts of their brains.

Materialism may be starting to hinder neuroscience.