Our favorite brains, including Einstein's stolen one

At Short Wave, we love a good brain. Which is why we’ve had a lot of conversations over the years with NPR’s neuroscience reporter, Jon Hamilton https://www.npr.org/people/2100615/jon-hamilton. Jon’s been writing about brains for over 15 years, from tiny brain organoids that grow in a dish, to fruit fly brains, mouse brains and some really memorable human brains. But Jon is retiring, so today on the show he joins us to share the most memorable brains he’s come across in the past couple of decades. Interested in more brain science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:24Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here. And at Short Wave, we love us some brains, which is why we've had a lot of conversations over the years with NPR's neuroscience reporter, John Hamilton. John is retiring, so today he's going to tell us about some of the most memorable brains he's come across, excluding mine, in the past couple decades. Hey, John.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Hey, Gina and Gina's brain. I am calling this episode "My Favorite Brains."

• 0:49Regina Barber?

  And I'm guessing there's a lot. I mean, you've been on the brain science beat for 15 years, is that right?

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, at least that long. There's so many brains, right? I have reported on those tiny brain organoids that grow in a dish.

• 1:02Regina Barber?

  Those are my favorite.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Fruit fly brains, mouse brains, artificial brains, and some really memorable human brains. Let me give you an example. So back in 2015, I did a story about a man who was missing a part of the brain called the cerebellum.

• 1:18Regina Barber?

  OK, I think I know what it is, but just to remind me, what is the cerebellum?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  It's this structure at the base of the brain that's about the size of your fist. It contains more than half of all the neurons that a typical person has. And it is absolutely critical to passing a roadside sobriety test.

• 1:36Regina Barber?

  OK, why is that?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Because the cerebellum is what lets you balance on one foot or keep your eyes on a moving target, like, say hypothetically, the pen that a police officer is moving from side to side in front of you. And alcohol pretty much disables the cerebellum.

• 1:53Regina Barber?

  OK, that's good to know. I think I knew that, actually.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  The guy did the story about Jonathan Kelleher. He never had a working cerebellum in the first place.

• 2:01Regina Barber?

  So did that mean he had problems with balance and coordination?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  He did, but he also had problems with all these other brain functions that turn out to rely on the cerebellum. So you have like speech and language. And you can hear that in this clip of Jonathan. He was in his 30s when I spoke with him, and he was telling me why he likes to socialize so much.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  One of the reasons I have thought of huge connection with...

• 2:29Speaker 03

  People, because I need them to help me learn stuff. Because why read a book or why do anything when you can be thorough and talk to people? And yeah, I mean, we're all in this world together.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  It is hard not to love this guy, right? But you can hear in his speech cadences, it's a bit odd and his thoughts can be a little disjointed. And scientists told me that's because, it turns out, that the cerebellum does a lot more than coordinate movement. It also coordinates everything from information to emotion in the brain.

• 3:09Regina Barber?

  Wow. OK. Today on the show, a tour of some of the remarkable brains John has reported on over the years.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Including Albert Einstein, which, Gina, you probably know was stolen after he died.

• 3:20Regina Barber?

  I didn't know that at all.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  And now you do.

• 3:24Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:37Speaker 00

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• 4:57Regina Barber?

  All right, John, before we move on to any other brains, what was it that led you to the story about a guy without a cerebellum?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  The short answer is that a scientist at Harvard named Dr. Jeremy Schmaman had been studying Jonathan. He introduced me to him. But the real reason, the deeper reason, was that for decades, the cerebellum was kind of dismissed as not being that interesting.

• 5:20Regina Barber?

  Really?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Jeremy once told me the cerebellum was like the Rodney Dangerfield of the brain because he got no respect.

• 5:27Regina Barber?

  Oh, I miss him.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  And Jonathan, because he didn't have a cerebellum, he offered this way to show why this part of the brain matters so much.

• 5:35Regina Barber?

  Wow, okay. So now I want to hear about Einstein's brain. First of all, who stole it? And I'm guessing I know why, but like, tell me the story.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  It was stolen by the pathologist who did the autopsy on Einstein.

• 5:50Regina Barber?

  Oh, no. Did they lose their job?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  He did.

• 5:54Regina Barber?

  Okay.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  But the reason he did this was that he wanted to find out why it was that Einstein's brain had made him such a genius.

• 6:01Regina Barber?

  This is very creepy, actually. What exactly happened?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Okay, here's the scene. It's 1955, Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein has just died, and all these people start showing up, you know, to pay homage. Meanwhile, the pathologist I mentioned, Dr. Thomas Harvey, he's doing the autopsy, which included removing Einstein's brain. So I talked about this with a guy named Michael Paterniti. He wrote a book about what happened next.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  It was like the death of the prophet. And so it got a little bit crazy. And out of that complete melee of the moment, he made off with the brain, and it was under somewhat dubious circumstances.

• 6:46Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but wait, wait, Gina, it gets weirder. The good doctor, he did lose his job over this.

• 6:54Regina Barber?

  Right.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  But somehow, he held on to the stolen brain. And over the decades, he would send bits of it to various scientists to see if they could figure out what made Einstein's brain so special.

• 7:07Regina Barber?

  I'm gonna guess they didn't find anything.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Well, most of the examinations concluded that the bits of Einstein's brain looked, you know, pretty ordinary.

• 7:15Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  But in the 1980s, a scientist at UC Berkeley got some samples. I should, I should mention, they arrived in the mail in a mayonnaise jar.

• 7:23Regina Barber?

  That is so awful. It's almost like, like mean to his memory, like in a man, in a mayonnaise jar.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  It's just beyond strange.

• 7:32Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Anyway, this scientist, whose name was Marion Diamond, found that the samples had a surprising number of cells called astrocytes.

• 7:41Regina Barber?

  Okay.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  And that was interesting because astrocytes are not neurons. You know, neurons are the brain cells we associate with thinking and genius and everything. Instead, these are a type of cell that scientists have kind of dismissed as, you know, just helper cells. They pick up after neurons that are doing all the important stuff.

• 8:00Regina Barber?

  I like the name astrocytes because it makes me think of astronomy, which makes me think of like, you know, astrophysics and general relativity.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  And that is how they got their name. They look like, yeah, they look like stars.

• 8:10Regina Barber?

  Oh, cool. Okay, so these helper cells, these astrocytes, is that what people think made Einstein a genius?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  That is a question that's probably never going to be resolved.

• 8:21Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  But over time, brain scientists have realized that astrocytes and other so-called glial cells, you know, the, the ones that are not neurons, they actually do play a big role in all these higher brain functions, perhaps even including the ability to develop a theory of relativity.

• 8:39Regina Barber?

  I love a good underdog story. That's why, you know, I love the Padres. Have you ever come across another underdog brain story in all of your reporting?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  I do too. So here's another one for you. It's about animal brains, which really don't get enough credit, in my humble opinion. So for centuries, scientists have been pointing to behaviors they say are unique to humans. And then, of course, they find out that some animal actually does the same thing. So for example, you know, there was a time they thought that only a human brain could make and use tools.

• 9:13Regina Barber?

  Right.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Then along comes Jane Goodall in the 1960s. And she's found a chimp named David Graybeard, who caught termites by making this sort of fishing pole out of twigs.

• 9:25Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and then crows, right?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Crows, right. Crows make hooks to catch insects, and octopuses carry around two halves of a coconut shell, put them together when they need shelter. There are lots of examples.

• 9:36Regina Barber?

  I mean, that sounds like all these animals are pretty intelligent. They have pretty, like, big brains, like humans. I mean, have you ever had a chance to see any animal making a tool?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  That only happened once. It was in 2011. I went to the Indianapolis Zoo to meet with an evolutionary biologist there. His name is Rob Shoemaker. And he had just co-authored a book called Animal Tool Behavior.

• 10:00Regina Barber?

  Right.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  And we had this-

• 10:01Regina Barber?

  I know what that book's about.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  You're a good guesser, Gina. So, as we're walking around the zoo, we had this moment. I was interviewing him outside the orangutan enclosure. And let me play you just a little bit of the radio story I did about this.

• 10:20Speaker 06

  You do have to not go up too closely because they can reach out pretty far and they'll take your equipment.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Of course, they would.

• 10:26Speaker 06

  And your wallet.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Right, yes. Several of the zoo's orangutans make it clear they'd like to have the microphone I'm carrying. Shoemaker tells a female named Kenobi that she can touch it.

• 10:37Speaker 06

  Nice soft microphone cover on that. But you cannot have the whole thing.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  When I move beyond her reach, Kenobi fetches a small tree branch.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  You're seeing Kenobi right now. There's some tool manufacturers. She's making a reaching tool to try and get your microphone.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Kenobi breaks off one fork of the branch so it will fit through the mesh around the enclosure. But the branch still isn't long enough, and she's determined.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Not too surprising. She now has a much bigger, stronger tool to come get the microphone. So she's gotten a full branch now.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  And this reaching tool-

• 11:07Speaker 06

  Gets the job done. So there you go. So she's doing her best to draw the mic in. Can I, we're not, I'm sorry, you cannot, you cannot have it. Good job with your tool. Thank you for the, thank you for that. We got to publish that. Oh, wow. Now she's gone and got a much bigger, stronger brain. So we're going to leave now.

• 11:29Regina Barber?

  She like had your number. She was like, I'm going to get your mic.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you're not supposed to become part of the story, but it just happened. Have you got time for just one more story about a remarkable brain, Jana?

• 11:39Regina Barber?

  I have all the time in the world for you, John. Let's do this.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  All right. So I want to tell a story about an autistic brain. It belongs to a person named Dax Daxer, who was a college student in Ohio when we spoke. I think that was in 2010. And Dax told me they felt like a space alien, you know, because they, who had sort of landed on Earth and was trying to make sense of all these neurotypical behaviors you see in college, you know, dating, making eye contact, getting together to watch the TV show Friends, which was a big thing at that time. So as a result, Dax had all these remarkable insights into typical humans and how we are hardwired to socialize and cooperate.

• 12:25Speaker 07

  I've seen them help people who are hurt. I've seen them draw together networks of people to make the world better. I've seen them connect different sorts of minds so that we could all communicate and live in a single society. I know you take it for granted, but it's really very amazing to be able to do that.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  I should mention that life was not easy for Dax. I mean, Dax experienced a lot of sadness and isolation, living among all these neurotypicals on a college campus. And there was this sort of longing that Dax had to be part of, you know, the social brain club. But Dax also realized that an autistic brain can really be extraordinary in its own way.

• 13:12Speaker 07

  I wonder what it is like to be one of, a unit of two.

• 13:20Speaker 07

  I don't know. But then again, they'll never know some of the beautiful things I see. The tiny little patterns on a leaf, or the intricacies of a circuit, or learning a new fact and almost squealing in joy because it's so beautiful.

• 13:38Regina Barber?

  This is beautiful.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  It is.

• 13:40Regina Barber?

  Like, their interpretation is beautiful.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  And you can see why DAX is one of my favorite brains of all time.

• 13:48Regina Barber?

  Oh. So, John, we've talked about the cerebellum, we've talked about Einstein's brain, we've talked about animals using tools. What brain would you really like to understand?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  I would be most curious about understanding a fruit fly brain.

• 14:05Regina Barber?

  Really? I mean, they're getting close to understanding a fruit fly brain.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  They've done what they call the connectome.

• 14:11Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  So, all the connections in a fruit fly brain. But that's not the same as understanding precisely how it's able to do the amazing things that it can do. It's a tiny, tiny brain.

• 14:22Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  But it can navigate in three dimensions better than the most advanced computers that Tesla has ever made.

• 14:31Regina Barber?

  Really?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  So, how is that, right? That's the question I'd really like to know.

• 14:34Regina Barber?

  Wow. John, thank you so much for all of this amazing reporting you've done for so many years and coming on the show. We have loved every minute.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Gina, you are so welcome. And I just want to say thanks to all of the amazing brains that make Short Wave.

• 14:53Regina Barber?

  Because our brains are basically the same.

• 14:59Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. And so did John. The audio engineer was Kwasi Lee. I'm Regina Barber.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  And I'm John Hamilton.

• 15:11Regina Barber?

  Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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