Hannah Fry

Hans Albert, and then managed to secure this sort of retrospective blessing in order to keep the brain on the condition that it could only be used for really rigorous scientific interrogation.

Okay, so that would have been great, you know, but Harvey was not this neuroscientist.

He's not a person who knows how to do any of this stuff.

And so he ended up, he refused to give the brain back to anybody who was kind of holding onto it.

And then he ended up going on this completely insane 40 year road trip where this brain was cut up into little chunks.

He cut it up into 240 little blocks and then preserved them in this really rubbery cellulose and dividing it into different jars here and there and then put them in this wooden cider box and then put it in the trunk of his car.

And then was like moving around the American Midwest, going and seeing people and being like, well, what do you think of this?

The first paper that was actually published on this wasn't till a few decades after, 30 years after Einstein's actual death.

And in terms of the scientific evidence,

insights that we've got from this is almost nothing because the brain was you know cut up in a way that wasn't usable it wasn't given to the right people all of this stuff so really all we know about Einstein's brain is that it sort of doesn't look that different to normal brains yeah golly so what he was just like driving it around to show it off to people was he trying to sell it or what

No, I think he knew he had this incredible scientific treasure and he would kind of bring it out.

He would bring it out of the cupboard and show friends and he would mail chunks to researchers who asked for it.

It's all over the place now, by the way.

It's not kind of united in one place.

Would I like some of it?

I mean, secretly, yes, I would.

I have to confess, I think it's incredibly disrespectful, but I probably still would quite like some of it.

Yeah.

No, definitely not.

Definitely not.