Uma pesquisa recente (janeiro de 2000) publicada na revista Nature Neurosciences relata que idiomas diferentes ativam áreas distintas do cérebro. Para verificar esse achado, os autores usaram o PET (Positron Emission Tomography) para medida do fluxo
sanguíneo, o qual monitorava a atividade cerebral de estudantes no momento em que faziam uma leitura em voz alta em sua
língua materna. Foram comparados alunos ingleses e italianos. Os resultados revelaram que os italianos utilizam mais a região
temporal superior do cérebro. Já os britânicos movimentam a região frontal esquerda e a temporal inferior.  O estudo pode ajudar
a compreender melhor a dislexia e outros problemas de leitura, bem como a maneira como a experiência modifica o uso do cérebro na leitura. Como a língua inglêsa não é perfeitamente fonética, e o italiano sim, acontece que os leitores de inglês têm que usar partes distintas do cérebro para poder gerar os fonemas de forma correta, em relação aos leitores em italiano.

Artigo original:
PET:

O desejo de Eistein quando morresse e'que seu corpo fosse cremado e seu cérebro doado para estudos de pesquisa. Quando morreu, aos 76 ans,
             Thomas S. Harvey, a pathologist at Princeton Hospital, removed Einstein’s brain. What happened to the
             brain for years after this is somewhat of a mystery.
 

Bigger means better: Why the brain of Albert
              Einstein was so superior

              MD in Hamilton finds his math section larger

                         By Nicolaas van Rijn
                        Toronto Star Staff Reporter

               ``Something deeply hidden had
               to be behind things.''
                        - Albert Einstein
 

              Albert Einstein transformed our understanding of almost everything in nature. But only now, more than four decades after his death, are we beginning to understand him, thanks to the Hamilton scientist who is studying the secret of what may have made his  mind tick.

His brain was different, says Dr. Sandra Witelson, the McMaster University neuroscientist who will report her findings tomorrow in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet.

Simply put, the math part of his brain was, well, bigger than in the rest of us.  ``This indicates that there may be an anatomical basis for differences in intelligence,'' said Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences at McMaster's faculty of health sciences.

 ``But,'' she stressed, ``it shouldn't be seen as anatomy is destiny. We also know that environment has a very important role to play in learning and brain development.

``This is telling us that environment isn't the only factor.''

   Einstein, who died in 1955 at age 76, turned the ``accepted'' world of scientific knowledge upside down during the two
 decades, beginning in 1905, when he formulated his most  important theories.

But, just as every Western schoolchild knows his famous equation, E=mc (energy equals mass times the velocity of light  squared), just about everyone who has ever come across his genius wonders how he got to be that way.

 Now, with Witelson's findings, scientists may finally begin clueing in on Einstein's unique abilities.

Working with a quarter of the scientist's brain - provided to her by the pathologist who autopsied Einstein at a small hospital in Princeton, N.J. - Witelson determined that, over-all, Einstein's brain had the same weight and many of the same measurements as other men.

That, she said, confirmed the belief of many scientists that focusing on over-all brain size as an indicator of
intelligence is  really no way to go.

 Instead, she found that the part of the brain believed to be related to mathematical reasoning - the inferior parietal
region - was 15 per cent wider on both sides than normal.

              ``Visual-spatial thinking and mathematical reasoning are
              strongly dependent on this region,'' Witelson said, adding the
              unusual anatomy of Einstein's brain may explain why he tackled
              scientific problems the way he did.

              Einstein himself had another way of describing his thought
              processes.

              ``Words do not seem to play any role,'' he once said, describing
              the ``associative play'' of ``more or less clear images'' of a
              ``visual and muscular type.''

              And Witelson found something else.

              Einstein's brain, she discovered, lacks a normal groove -
called a
              sulcus - found in the rest of us.

              Working with McMaster's unique, 20-year-old brain bank - a
              collection of preserved brains - Witelson compared Einstein's
              brain with the preserved organs of 35 men and 56 women
              known to have normal intelligence when they died, and found
              the unique difference.

              ``We looked at all regions of the brain,'' Witelson said, ``but
              speculated that it might be the inferior parietal region,''
the top
              of the brain she defined as ``the part covered by a hat.

              ``It's there where the kinds of cognitive processes are that are
              involved in the work that Einstein did in the theory of
              relativity.''

              The sulcus that runs from the front of the brain to the back in
              most of the rest of us didn't go all the way in Einstein's
brain,
              Witelson found.

              ``In Einstein's brain, this fissure took a different course,
and it
              ended up turning up close to the front of the brain, so it
did not
              go into that parietal region,'' she noted.

              ``This is such a major difference that it suggests that the
              development of Einstein's brain was unusual . . . some genetic
              information, something that resulted sort of in an orchestration
              of the way the brain was developing and put itself together,
              was very atypical.''

              Witelson and the researchers working with her speculate that
              the absence of the groove may have allowed more neurons in
              this area to establish connections between each other and work
              together more easily.

              An immediate application of her work, Witelson said, may be
              new hope for researchers in search of answers for diseases that
              afflict the brain.

              With more information on the anatomical basis of different
              levels of ability, she noted, the research could eventually help
              individuals with difficulties, including developmental problems
              and dyslexia.

              Witelson literally lucked into the research - until now,
scientists
              were limited to working with tiny fragments of Einstein's
brain -
              after Harvey, the Princeton pathologist who autopsied
              Einstein's brain, made contact with her after reading about her
              work and invited her to study the organ.

              ``He had everything, he had the whole brain, he had the files
              and everything,'' Witelson recalled.

              ``He came up, he brought the brain, he brought all his files, he
              spent several weeks here, more than once, and that's how we
              got to do it.''