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  3. It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine. The gray matter ho

It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine. The gray matter ho

admin2016-11-21  57
问题     It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine. The gray matter housed inside that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space, motion — the very foundations of physical reality — not just once but several times during his astonishing career. Yet while there clearly had to be something remarkable about Einstein’s brain, the pathologist who removed it from the great physicist’s skull after his death reported that the organ was, to all appearances, well within the normal range — no bigger or heavier than anyone else’s.
    But a new analysis of Einstein’s brain by Canadian scientists reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning — two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best — was significantly larger than average. Its cells may have been more closely connected, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively. While the case is far from proven, it’s a fascinating discovery.
    What they found was that while the overall size of Einstein’s brain was about average, a region called the inferior parietal lobe(顶骨下叶)was about 15% wider than normal. "visuaspatial(视觉空间)cognition, mathematical thought and imagery of movement," write Witelson and her co-authors, "are strongly dependent on this region." And as it happens, Einstein’s impressive insights tended to come from visual images he conjured up intuitively, and were then translated into the language of mathematics(the theory of special relativity, for example, was triggered by his musing on what it would be like to ride through space on a beam of light).
    Not only was Einstein’s inferior parietal region unusually bulky, the scientists found, but a feature called the Sylvian fissure(大脑外侧裂)was much smaller than average. Without the groove that normally slices through the tissue, the brain cells were parked close together, permitting more interconnections — which in principle can permit more cross-referencing of information and ideas, leading to great leaps of insight.
    That’s the idea, anyway. But while it’s quite plausible according to current neurological theory, that doesn’t necessarily make it true. We know Einstein was a genius, and we now know that his brain was physically different from the average. But none of this proves a cause-and-effect relationship. "What you really need," says Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Structural Neuroscience Laboratory at Meclean Hospital, " is to look at the brains of a number of mathematical geniuses to see if the same abnormalities are present."
    Even if they are, it’s possible that the bulked-up brains are result of strenuous mental exercise, not an inherent feature that makes genius possible. Bottom line: we still don’t know whether Einstein was born with an extraordinary mind or whether he earned it, one brilliant idea at a time.
The passage is mainly about______.
选项 A、how different Einstein’s brain was from others’
B、whether Einstein was born a genius
C、what made Einstein a brilliant scientist
D、why Einstein’s brain was different from others’
答案B
解析 主旨大意题。通读第四、五段可知C，D所述并无定论，A所说不是文章的主旨。故答案为B。
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