In the 1920s, German researcher Vogt studied Lenin’s brain and proved his genius. However, as a neurophysiologist, the head of the laboratory of neurophysiology and neural interfaces at the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University told socialbites.ca. According to Lomonosov Alexander Kaplan, Vogt was unable to reach such conclusions in the 1920s because brain science was in its early stage of development.
Vogt noted “the complexity of the relief and configuration of the gyri, especially in the frontal lobe, with a large percentage of the cortex in the depth of the sulcus and a resulting increase in the total size of the cerebral cortex.” as well as the particularly large size of the frontal lobe (involved in situational evaluation, prediction, and generalization functions) relative to the rest of the brain.”
According to Kaplan, the large percentage of cortex in the depth of the groove is explained by the small size of Lenin’s skull. But this does not give the right to draw conclusions about his mental abilities – this is just a feature of the structure of the skull and brain.
“Lenin’s brain is smaller than the average human brain, weighing 1340 grams. It has more “wrinkles” because it has to fit into a relatively small skull. Therefore, Vogt saw these grooves and it turned out that the percentage of bark contained within the grooves was large. But that doesn’t mean anything. Let me remind you that Einstein had an even smaller brain, weighing 1230 grams,” explains Kaplan.
Vogt also recorded images of Lenin III in various regions of his cerebral cortex. provided evidence that layer pyramidal neurons (the main excitatory neurons of the mammalian brain) are extraordinarily large and numerous. According to him, these can be considered as the structural basis of rich associative connections between different areas of the cortex.
Kaplan noted that Vogt was a good anatomist, but he could not come to a conclusion about what functions this or that brain structure performed.
“Anatomically, we now know 95% of what is known about how the brain works. In Vogt’s time, he knew 5%. It is clear that Vogt at that time could only guess which brain structures were responsible for what. And he guessed wrong because pyramidal neurons somehow It is now known that pyramidal neurons are motor output neurons that carry information from the cerebral cortex to the muscles, but they are not designed to connect the different parts of the cortex necessary for associations, Kaplan said.
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It was the first time before published Resignation letter from Vogt, the neurologist who worked on Lenin’s brain.