Everybody wants to be a genius, setting the intellectual agenda of the day and shaping the future of theories to come. Are we any closer to knowing what marks out the glittering few from the pedestrian many? Sandra Witelson of McMaster University in Hamilton is a good person to ask. She’s the only neuroscientist to get her hands on Albert Einstein’s brain. What’s more, she reckons she’s the first academic with 150 “normal” brains for comparison and psychometric tests of their owners while they were alive. Alison Motluk talked to the woman who stalks genius . . .
How did…
