March 20th, 2008 by Mylo
What makes a man a genius? Russian neuroscientists were pondering this exactly this question in the early 1900s and did exactly what seemed sensible at the time - they collected and dissected the brains of some of the greatest cultural figures in a huge collection called ‘The Pantheon of Brains’.
It’s a fascinating story told in a recent article published in the medical journal Brain. Amazingly, the last brain was only added in 1989.
Rather fittingly, the collection contains the brains of some of the Russia’s greatest psychologists and neuroscientists and has many curious aspects to it, such as the mysterious death of its founder. After death, his brain was immediately added to the collection.
In 1927, Bekhterev came up with a plan to organize ‘The Pantheon of Brains’ in Leningrad in order to collect elite brains. It was a severe irony of fate that precisely when the question about creating the Pantheon had been positively solved, the very initiator of this creation, Bekhterev, suddenly passed away. The circumstances are still questionable.On December 17, 1927, the First All-Union Congress of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists was held in Moscow. Bekhterev, along with L. S. Minor and G. I. Rossolimo, was elected as honourable chairmen of the congress. On December 23rd, the last day of the congress, Bekhterev gave a presentation during the afternoon session. In the evening, symptoms of a gastrointestinal disorder started and 24 hs later, Bekhterev died of (as officially stated) acute heart failure. Without any further post-mortem pathoanatomical investigation, his brain was removed, in accordance with his will, and his body was cremated the next day. However, the idea did not fade away.
In 1928, the neuroanatomical laboratory of Vogt and his Russian colleagues were reorganized into the Moscow Brain Research Institute, where the structured collecting and mapping of the brains of famous Russians started. Bekhterev did not see his plan come to fruition, but his own brain enriched the collection of the Moscow Institute (the weight of his brain was 1720g). The collection acquired the brains of Soviet politicians, famous writers, poets, musicians, etc. Read the rest of this entry »
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got on stage at D6 with Walt and Kara to talk… Microsoft, of course. While the company is still being rather coy about Windows 7 — some have blamed loose lips early on in Vista development for saddling the OS with too high of expectations and making things difficult for developers — they were nice enough to show off what Ballmer called “the smallest snippet” of Windows 7. The big reveal was multi-touch support, which utilizes technology developed by the Surface team. The taskbar seems to have been reworked a bit, and the demo was running live on a Dell Latitude XT tablet. Apparently Microsoft is reworking the whole user interface with a multitouch experience in mind. Steve reiterated the “three years after Vista” mantra for availability. Not exactly earth-shattering, but we’ll take what we can get at this point.