the amazing story of einsten's brain

Andrew Nyerere

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The brain grew in the body of a German woman in the summer of 1878 in the Swabian Alps of the Danube. The woman lived there with her husband in a medieval city called Ulms. The husband was a cheerful man 31 years old who had an electrical business near their apartment. She was 11 years his junior,she kept house and played the piano when her chores were done.
No one alive knows how Pauline Einstein conducted herself in its crucial years.This was the 1st child after 2 years of marriage,perhaps the brain blossomed while she banged out Beethoven and devoured the local delicacies of sausage,and onion cakes and sweet apple wine.
Hermann Einstein no doubt wished good things for his unborn child,but in all likelihood he did not pray for them.He and his wife did not attend the local synagogue or deny themselves pork. Such customs seemed ancient superstition to him.
Their families were Swabian Jews from southern Germany who had passed down a laissez-faire attitude toward the less practical facets of life,religion included. So while masons erected the tallest church spire in Europe opposite his workshop,Hermann did not contemplate the will of God.
By the 4th week,125,000 cells assembled along the grove in the middle of the neural tube,each an ancestor of the of the some 100 billion neurons that would stun the world.They divided and multiplied 50,000 per second. The they drifted forth,like pioneers in a fluid wilderness,to settle the cerebral frontier.
The nerve cells clung to their nursemaids,the glial cells.Chemical instructions zinged back and forth telling each cell where to take its place. For the oldest ones,the journey was short,completed in a single day. With every successive migration from the centre the journey lengthened,with the later ones travelling more that a week to reach the outer edge of the fetal brain.

 
There was something otherworldly about being in the presence of the disshevelled physicist whose daydreams redesigned the universe. People who met Einstein never forgot it. They would vividly recall details about the day,the mood and the weather.
The more the world adored his genius,the more celebrity bewildered him. When thousands of Japanese fans held a night long vigil below his Tokyo hotel room in 1922 and roared their approval when he appeared on the balcony the next morning, Einstein told his wife,'' No living being deserves this sort of reception...I'm afraid we're swindlers. We'll end in prison yet'' Humble protests that he was just a curious person increased the veneration of strangere most of whom undersoodt nothing of the theoretical physics which had made him famous in the first place.They wrote to him from all corners of the globe,for advice on their marriages,for handwriting samples,for the meaning of life. Einstein wrote back,to prison inmates,and children and beleagured wives. But he was stingy with his name and suspicious of those who intended to use it for their own purposes.
Despite all this,Harry Zimmerman thought the plan for a Jewish-sponsored medical school would appeal to him. So,a group of doctors went to him and told him so. Predictably,Einstein was astonished. He said he was no physician,that a medical school should be named for someone trained in medicine. Zimmerman pointed out that medicine and mathematics often converged. Stiil,Einstein was unimpressed. So Zimmerman tried another tack and told him that a refusal would force him to select Sigmund Freud as the namesake.
'But this will imply that your school was committed to psychoanalysis'',Einstaien said.
'Well,then we could name it the William Osler School of Medicine' Zimmerman replied.
''But he is not Jewish''
''In that case we shall call it the Joseph Goldberger School .''
Einstein looked troubled.''Who is Joseph Goldberger?''
''You know Professor,'' Zimmerman said triumphantly,''no one would ask me'Who is Dr. Einstein?''
A smile played around the edge of Einstein's mouth,and he asked whether Zimmerman had said he was a doctor or a lawyer.
Three months later,they met at Princeton again when more than 100 people gathered in driving rain to celebrate the physicist's 74th birthday and the official naming of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.


 
By the fall of 1878,it was just over a centimetre long. Two hemispheres budded on either side of the central groove. Nerves hurried to connect with one another. By the 24th week 70,000 cells huddled in brain tissue the size of a pinhead. Nerve cells began to form the cerebral cortex. Somewhere in them lay the potential to envision and reason,to translate imagined observations of space into profound mathematical equations.
The primitive cells burst into neurons. Branches of dendrites sprouted across their cell bodies and fanned out. Meanwhile,an axon grew like a trunk on each neuron,to send messages,to make synaptic connections with a dendrite. They snaked through layers and lobes and criss crossed the fibrous canyon of the corpus callosum that connected the brain's two halves.They stretched through the inner sea-horse form of the hippocampus that straddled the brain stem and several centimetres down,to the very base of the spinal column. The cells forged trillions of connections to process the world. But half the 200 billion neurons were surplus,an overabundance to guide the growing fetal body. Partway through the prenatal life,tens of thousands of them committed mass suicide. They literally pulverized their own genetic material. Had all of them lived,inflating the brain to unseemly proportions,they surely would have retarded its function.
At the brain's core,structure common to every creature with a backbone kept the body alive. The fist-like cerebellum,the almond-shaped amygdala,the thalamus above the hypothalamus began shouting chemical orders to sleep and breathe,to pump blood and churn out hormones. Through the pons,a bridge beautifully spiaralling nerve cells,down through the medulla oblangata and into the spine,the brain reached out to the body. It monitored the heart,liver,stomach and kidneys and evaluated their fitness to survive outside the womb. On the cusp of a spring,a March day in 1879,a chemical whisper from a pea-sized hypothalamus shot cortisol into the bloodstream and Pauline Einstein's contractions began.
 
...And the whole essence of the story is.................... can you continue from here?
 
Nimezaliwa siku moja na huyu genious,najivunia na kujitahidi niwe juu kwa uelewa
 
Mopalmo said:
Nimezaliwa siku moja na huyu genious,najivunia na kujitahidi niwe juu kwa uelewa
Click to expand...

Wewe umezaliwa 1878? duh! basi wewe mzee unashikilia rikodi ya dunia ya "longevity".
 
dah si wa Shule za kata ambao hata kingereza tumefundishwa kwa Kiswahili hapo tumetoka kapa translator please!
 
This is just the story of his brain,and of how scientists dissected it to try to find the secret of his genius.
 
His parents thought his head looked physically unusual from the start,they wondered if he was deformed,but doctors told them time would make it right.
In his infant cortex,glial cells spun fatty white sheaths of myelin to insulate them like electric wires. The sheaths speed impulses 10 to 100 times faster that they can travel on a naked axon,and those allowing him to see,hear,touch and move probably myelinated first,smoothing the baby's jerky motions.
His parents worried about his brain even after he had learned to walk,because Albert did not jabber new words as other toddlers did. He often repeated himself under his breath after he spoke. So later scientists would wonder whether neural networks devoted to language had already ceded cortical ground to some other cognitive function. Einstein told biographers that he had simply put off talking until he could speak in complete sentences.
At the age of 5,his brain puzzled at the compass his father gave him,transfixed by the inevitable force that kept its needle pointed north. That same year,he tossed a chair at his violin teacher,but with practice the malleable young cortex obliged,so that withing a decade he played Mozart on the violin.
The childhood brain forged millions more connections than it could ever use. Each waited to be stimulated,directed to a certain task,to grip a pencil,plunk a piano,laugh. Neurons competed with each other for thinking jobs,and the losers perished in another round of ruthless pruning.
Some schoolteachers thought Eintsein dull-witted and moody,said he would never amount to anything because he responded to them with open disrespect for their authority. Yet Einstein had no difficulty concentrating when he chose to.His younger sister,Maja,always remembered how he buit a house of cards 14 storeys high. The poor medical students his father hosted for lunch on Thursdays would fascinate him too,introducing the young Einstein to books about science,astronomy and philosophy. His Uncle Jakob presented algebra to him as a ''merry science in which we go hunting for a little animal whose name we do not know'',and in these matters Einstein flourished,his young brain soaking the language of mathematics,bending neurons to its logic. At 12 he fell in love with Euclid,caling the text his uncle gave him his ''holy geometry book''. At 13 he began to study higher mathematics on his own,surpassing the knowledge of his own instructors. In the midst of family parties,he squeezed onto the sofa,balanced an inkpod on the armrest,and worked fevereshly on equations,oblivious to everyone around him. At 16,Einstein wrote his uncle a letter proposing an experiment to see if electricity,magnetism and ether were connected. Already,synapses fired toward an extraordinary future.

 
In its 26th year,the brain's performance peaked. An adolescence spent digesting Copernicus,Kepler,Galileo,Newton's laws of gravity Maxwell's theories of electromagnetism had likely beaten well-worn paths of cellular connections. Pulses of electricity that can travel more than 300km per hour between neurons,releasing dopamine,serotonin and acetylcholine chemicals to spark other neurons,that can take just one-thousandth of a second to recharge and fire again. With the daring of youth,and whole pints of blood coursing under his skull by the second,the brain manipulated mental images at unknown speeds.
For 200 years,scientists had assumed that light moved in waves.like ripples in a pond. But experiments at the turn of the century showing that light was capable of knocking electrons off metal sheets.literally scattering them from the surface,bruised this notion. The German physicist Max Planck,the father of quantum theory,suggested that tiny particles,or quanta,absorb and emit light so that it is actually matter that displaces the electron. But Einstein pushed the concept even further. He claimed that light itself is made up of particles,discrete chunks of energy[later known as photons] that can batter the surface of metal and send the electrons flying. At the time,Einstein considered this hypothesis unprovable,yet this so-called photoelectric effect would win him his first and only Nobel Prize fifteen years later and lay the groundwork for the 20th century's electronic achievements-radio and television,remote control and motion detectors,machines to scan everything from carry-on luggage to groceries at the supermarket.
 
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