This New App Let’s You Poke Around Inside Einstein’s Actual Brain

Normally I’d rather read about flaming bag of poo than some new app, but here’s the exception: a new iPad app contains scanned slides of sections of Einstein’s brain, available for anyone to poke and prod at. Sure, it’s $9.99, but how else are you going to get to hold Einstein’s brain in your hands?

The National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago, a new museum under development, was granted the rights to scan and digitize a series of 350 slides made from sections of Einstein’s brain after his death in 1955. Those sections were performed by Thomas Harvey, who removed Einstein’s brain in the hopes of unlocking the secrets of his über-genius. In 1999, Harvey gave samples to a research team he was working with, and ended up publishing results that showed Einstein’s parietal lobe — a region concerned with the understanding of math and spatial relationships — was 15 percent wider than average.

Via iTunes

Those results are fascinating, and a potential blow to all those moms out there that say that a bigger brain doesn’t make a smarter person. The app, called NMHMC Harvey, is designed to potentially take Harvey’s work even further. By handing anyone, neuroscientist or not, microscopic scans of the tissues slides, NMHMC hopes to support new breakthroughs in Einstein brain research, and perhaps inspire a couple new neuroscientists along the way.

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Of course, there’s also the question of what Einstein might think about his brain being displayed to any old joker with ten bones. I mean, your brain seems like your most private organ, right? Oddly enough, Einstein’s brain has already been on one hell of a journey. Before Harvey handed over slides to the team behind the 1999 paper, he’d handed out some of his slide collection to a number of prominent researchers. Some were even lost and presumed gone forever, until they were found behind a beer cooler in a mislabeled box at Harvey’s home by reporter Steven Levy in 1978.

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Considering how much his sliced-up brain has been tossed about, I suppose the app might not cause Einstein too much more bother. Still, how do we know?

“There’s been a lot of debate over what Einstein’s intentions were,” NMHMC board member Jim Paglia said. “We know he didn’t want a circus made of his remains. But he understood the value to research and science to study his brain, and we think we’ve addressed that in a respectful manner.”

I suppose putting brain sections into a kinda expensive museum app is pretty highbrow. But honestly, there’s no way Einstein could ever have expected his brain to be mingling bits with Angry Birds.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.