According to a news release from Florida State University, researchers have discovered one of the secrets of Einstein’s brilliance: the left and right hemispheres of Einstein’s brain were exceptionally well connected to each other and may have been party responsible for his genius.

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

According to the news release, lead author Weiwei Men of East China Normal University’s Department of Physics created a new method to conduct the research, which is the very first to describe Einstein’s corpus callosum, the brain’s biggest accumulation of fibers that links the two cerebral hemispheres and assists the progress of interhemispheric communication.

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

The physicist’s method determines and color-codes the differing thicknesses of subdivisions of the corpus callosum along its length, where nerves navigate from one side of the brain to the other. These thicknesses signal the number of nerves that lie across and thus how “connected” the two sides of the brain are in specific regions, which aids varying functions based on where the fibers cross along the length. For instance, motion of the hands is accomplished toward the front and math along the back.

This new method allowed comparison of Einstein’s thicknesses with those of two samples — one of 15 older men and one of 52 men Einstein’s age in 1905. At 26 years old, Einstein published four papers that altered the world’s views about space, time, mass and energy.

The researchers discovered that Einstein had more well-connected hemispheres compared to both younger and older sample groups.

The study’s findings were recently published in the journal Brain.

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