Dear Linux Magazine Reader,

I always perk up when I hear new information about the brain, with the hope that it will improve my own brain, or, at least, provide it some exercise. The brain has been in the news recently. All of our brains improve when we read about brains in the news: Slashdot covered it; the BBC covered it. The news is, they found a 2,000-year-old skull with part of the brain left in it [1]. No one actually has any hope of jump-starting this brain, but it is still interesting to scientists. The skull with part of a brain was found in a muddy pit, where it appeared to have been part of some kind of ritual offering. According to the experts, "There is something unusual in the way the brain has been treated … ."

You can learn a lot about a culture from how it treats its brains. The ancients Egyptians believed the brain was totally unnecessary for the afterlife; therefore, they extracted it through the nose with a long wire hook as part of the mummification process [2]. Closer to our own time, Albert Einstein's brain [3] was extracted in the hospital where he died by the pathologist who was on call for the evening. The pathologist took photos of the brain and later divided it in several pieces, storing the pieces in two large jars. He had plans to investigate the properties of the brain, or possibly, to get a brain expert to investigate it, but he lost his job at the hospital, and the brain was left in his basement until his ex-wife threatened to throw the jars away if he didn't move them.

[...]