Letters started pouring in to Switzerland’s University of Bern from physicists all over Europe with questions and praise. Some came from the most esteemed scientists of the day. The letters were addressed to one Albert Einstein, who a number of months earlier had published his theory of relativity. But what the letter writers didn’t know was that Einstein didn’t work at the university. The physicists knew that he lived in Bern and just assumed he was a professor at the university there.
In fact, Einstein had nothing to do with the university. He was a patent clerk. A government worker had turned the world of physics upside down.
We all know the story of how Einstein, at a young age, made stunning advances in physics. Most of us also have heard that Einstein was a poor student and was able to make his pioneering discoveries in physics despite being completely divorced from academia.
It was almost too extraordinary to believe. A twenty-six-year-old emerges seemingly out of nowhere with a scientific theory that changes the world. That alone would have been unprecedented. But ten years later Einstein once again revolutionized physics, reinventing our understanding of gravity. Today Einstein’s name is virtually synonymous with genius.
The explanation that most of us have grown up with for Einstein’s breakthroughs is that Einstein had such a brilliant and unusual mind that he—almost magically, in a stroke of insight—saw the universe in a whole new way.
In trying to understand Einstein’s unique genius, scientists over the years initially focused on the structural nature of his brain. Einstein had such an extraordinary mind, scientists reasoned, that there must be something fundamentally different about his brain.
When Einstein died in 1953, coroner Thomas Harvey removed what had become the most famous brain in history as a matter of course; it was a regular part of the autopsy procedure. What he did next, however—putting the brain in a jar of formaldehyde, slipping the jar into a bag, and walking off with it—was not. But Harvey believed it was his duty to science and to the world to preserve Einstein’s brain in order to let researchers study it and unlock the secrets of his mind.
In the succeeding years, neuroscientists, or neuroanatomists, as they used to be called, asked Harvey for certain sections of the brain in a race to pinpoint exactly which part of Einstein’s brain was so unique.
Scientists found that Einstein had a higher-than-average concentration of neurons in the part of the brain responsible for mathematical thinking. This seemed like a promising lead. The problem with this finding, however, was that Einstein wasn’t exceptionally gifted in math. His first wife, Mileva Maric, used to check all his calculations and correct them. And while Einstein was far more accomplished in math than your average English—or math—major, his discoveries weren’t really mathematical breakthroughs. Instead, his theories of relativity reconceptualized our notions of time and space. They were more a new set of ways of looking at the universe, supported by the math, than a set of complex mathematical formulas.
Another scientist, Marian C. Diamond, discovered that Einstein had more glial cells than average. Glial cells make up the myelin layer that insulates the brain’s axons, speeding up communication between the neurons. They also function as a distribution system, bringing energy to the neurons while removing waste.
However, only in one area of Einstein’s brain was the difference in glial cells statistically significant. And since Einstein’s brain was older than the other brains Diamond compared it against, and glial cells continue to divide as we age, it was only natural that Einstein had more of them. So while his glial network conceivably could have had something to do with his genius, we simply cannot know its impact for certain.
On and on went the physiological investigations. Scientists discovered that Einstein’s brain was wider than average. On the other hand, it also weighed less than average.
In the end, the studies on Einstein’s brain proved compromised in many ways and yielded no real insight into his genius. The reality is that each of us has unique idiosyncrasies in the makeup of our brain.
Even Einstein didn’t think it was his brain that made him who he was. He once commented that the gap between what the public thought of his intellectual prowess and the reality was “grotesque.”
But if it wasn’t his brain that made the difference, what did set Einstein apart? And what does Einstein’s genius have to do with chaos?
At the University of Zurich at the turn of the twentieth century, rows of well-dressed students would have been taking copious notes, smoking, and tackling complex formulas. One student who likely would not have been in the room, however, was Einstein, who was inclined to skip class and hang out in the coffeehouses on the Bahnhofstrasse, talking about new ideas in physics with the café crowd.
In the summer, while other physics students were working in labs or helping professors publish papers, Einstein hiked the beautiful trails of the Appenzell District in the Alps. It was as if his entire year were one big, unstructured interlude.
And that is our first clue to Einstein’s genius. To all appearances, Einstein was a slacker. Granted, he was a slacker obsessed with theoretical physics, but he was a slacker nonetheless.
He couldn’t be bothered to go to class. He engendered so little confidence in his academic abilities that one of his instructors suggested he give up studying physics altogether. In a great bit of irony, when graduation rolled around, Einstein was the only unemployed member of the class of 1900. His father, Hermann, tried to call in favors to get his son a job, but to no avail.
Imagine his poor mother’s desperate concern: “You have to start going to class.” “What happened to the intelligent young man I knew?” “You know, if you worked harder, you’d be surprised by how much progress you could make.”
It’s easy to sympathize with his parents’ likely responses. Einstein’s seemingly dilettante behavior would have driven most parents to distraction.
But his parents’ misgivings were for naught. What Einstein was actually doing was exercising a very special part of his brain.
Most of us tend to have clearly defined ideas about what makes up the road to success. We value discipline and diligence, hard work, and the idea of “paying your dues.” Unstructured time just “hanging out” is for teenagers with too much time on their hands, we think, and for surfer bums. Most of us need to pay attention, study hard, and learn.
But that’s not what Einstein did at all. As we’ll see, Einstein followed a specific process in developing his ideas—one intimately related to the chaos imperative. It is one that arguably led to his extraordinary and unpredictable brilliance. And it is one that each of us can tap into as well.
~~The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness and Success -by- Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack
