A new release from Florida State University highlights the finding that the left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein’s brain were unusually well connected and may have contributed to his brilliance.

“This study, more than any other to date, really gets at the ‘inside’ of Einstein’s brain,” said Dean Falk, a evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University. “It provides new information that helps make sense of what is known about the surface of Einstein’s brain.”

Lead author Weiwei Men from East China Normal University’s Department of Physics developed a new technique to conduct the study. It is the first study to detail Einstein’s corpus callosum, which is the brain’s largest bundle of fibers connecting the the two cerebral hemispheres.

“This technique should be of interest to other researchers who study the brain’s all-important internal connectivity,” Falk said.

The technique measures and color-codes the differing thicknesses of the subdivisions of the corpus callosum along its length, where nerves cross from one hemisphere to the other. These thicknesses indicate the number of nerves that cross and there how “connected” the two hemispheres are in specific regions.

This technique permitted registration and comparison of Einstein’s measurements with those of two other samples. One was a sample of 15 elderly men and one of 52 men Einstein’s age in 1905. That year was considered Einstein’s miracle year when he published four articles that contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed the world’s views about space, time, mass and energy.

The study findings showed that Einstein had more extensively connected areas in certain parts of his cerebral hemispheres compared to both younger and older control groups.

The research of Einstein’s corpus callosum was initiated by Men, who had requested the high resolution photographs that Falk and other researchers published in 2012 of the inside surfaces of the two halves of Einstein’s brain.

The current research team included not only Men, but also Falk, who was a second author of the study, Tao Sun of the Washington University School of Medicine and Weibo Chen, Jianqi Li, Dazhi Yin, Lili Zang and Mingxia Fan from East China Normal University’s Department of Physics.

The study, named “The Corpus Callosum of Albert Einstein’s Brain: Another Clue to His High Intelligence,” was published in the journal Brain.