Oversized Brains?

[Ranchoth]

A Medical quesion, this time...are there any medical conditions that can result in a person being born with an proportionately oversized Brain (And an oversized Cranium to boot, I'd assume)?

I'm kind of guessing that the answer is "no," but I thought I'd ask, just to be sure.

[gypsymoth3]

umm... i heard that einstein's brain was larger than normal.

[MLS]

I've heard the reverse -- that Einstein's brain was slightly smaller than average. Obviously very efficient, though.

[bibliophage]

There is a condition called hydrocephalus, which can cause the head to swell. But it's not because the brain is bigger but because of an accumulation of spinal fluid.

Einstein's brain was slightly smaller than the average for men: 1230 g. vs. an average of 1400 g. See http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ein.html There is only a very weak correlation between brain mass and intelligence. Anatole France, a pretty smart dude by most accounts, had a brain that was only 1017 g.

Those interested in the story of Einstein's brain may want to read Cecil Adams on Is Einstein's brain kept in a bottle in a small-town doctor's office near Kansas City? The column seems to be a bit out of date. Most of the brain is now back in New Jersey.

[Zenster]

Here is an article on Einstein's brain. It was not oversized.

Some excerpts:

By Kenneth Chang
ABCNEWS.com

June 17 — Albert Einstein, the unassuming genius of relativity
and E=mc2, was no swollen head. But his brain — at least one portion of it — really was bigger than what’s in the rest of us.

In the June 19 issue of the medical journal The Lancet, researchers at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, report that the portion of the brain associated with mathematics was 15 percent wider than average in Einstein ...

... Furthermore, they found that the groove that normally runs from the front of the brain to the back did not extend all the way in Einstein’s case. A 1955 photograph of Albert Einstein's brain ...

... The overall size of Einstein’s brain is unremarkable. It actually weighed a third of a pound less than the three-pound average of adult males. In 1985, scientists at University of California, Berkeley reported that portions of Einstein’s brain had higher-than-normal numbers of glial cells, which feed neurons. The Berkeley researchers suggested that the extra glial cells were needed to nourish Einstein’s high-performance neurons, but that finding remained controversial ...

... The parietal lobes, located behind the brain’s frontal lobes, have been linked with various kinds of higher-level thinking, including processing of visual information, mathematics, language and music. A missing groove might have allowed Einstein’s brain to form more connections between neurons in this region ...

... Einstein’s brain fell in the range of normal for all measurements, except for the portion known as the inferior parietal lobes, located in the middle of the brain. Other experiments have shown the parietal lobes are involved in mathematics, as well as music and processing of visual images
“The region of the brain that seems to be different in Einstein is the part that would be used in his unusual abilities,” comments John Kaas, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University. “That makes a stronger argument. If they showed a difference in some other part of brain, I wouldn’t be as impressed.”
Witelson says the missing groove, known as the sulcus, was likely always absent in that part of Einstein’s brain, rather than shrinking away as a result of his intelligence, because it appears very early in life.

[Melanie]

Yes - encephalitis, nasty nasty stuff.