How often do you find yourself driving in your car and you see the traffic light turning yellow, so you speed onward, passing under the light just as it turns red, and you think, "That was stupid. Why did I do that? Am I in such a hurry to get where I’m going that it’s worth risking my life, barely getting through this light as it turns red? I’m not doing that anymore!" And then you look at the rear-view mirror and see a car behind you, in no particular hurry, going through the same red light after you, and there’s another car, also in no particular hurry, leisurely driving through the red light, behind the car that’s behind you.

          Sometimes people act like they don’t have the God-given sense to come in out of the rain, even though, evolutionarily speaking, we’re the most intelligent life in our solar system (which isn’t saying much when you consider that scientists would be ecstatic just to find a live amoeba on the planet Mars.)

          It’s a well-known fact that humans only use a tiny fraction of the human brain’s capacity. If you’ve ever heard some of the things Ray Nagin has said in public, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

          One of the greatest brains of all time belonged to Albert Einstein. Einstein was very smart, but more importantly, he looked like a genius, what with all that gray hair sticking up all over the place. When you turn on a light or watch a movie, you probably think of Einstein – although I can’t figure out why you would, because those were both inventions of Thomas Edison, who was no slacker in the brain department, either.

          Einstein’s principal contribution to mankind was the creation of the atomic bomb. Now, it would be small-minded of us to think less of Einstein simply because the most practical application of his most famous invention was to kill hundreds of thousands of people and level an entire city. If you will recall, Einstein also postulated the theory of relativity, which has many other useful applications…that I can’t think of at the moment…possibly the creation of more nuclear weapons.
          Albert Einstein died in 1955, but the story of his brain doesn’t end there, because even though Einstein is no longer with us, his brain still is. For this, we owe a great deal of gratitude to Dr. Thomas Harvey, the doctor (at least until his medical license was taken away) who conducted the autopsy on Einstein after his death. Harvey thought it would be a neat idea to take Einstein’s brain home with him, which he did.

He kept it in two glass jars, occasionally delving out slices of the brain to researchers interested in studying it. He even took the brain on a road trip, in a plastic Tupperware^®container stashed in the trunk of his car, to visit Einstein’s granddaughter. (I’m not making this up. There was actually a book about it, entitled Driving Mr. Albert, by Michael Paterniti, which chronicled this adventure.) After 40 years, Harvey finally turned over what was left of the brain to a pathologist at PrincetonUniversity, where, hopefully, it is under tight security. We certainly wouldn’t want a brain like that falling into the wrong hands.

          The brain is a resilient organ. Just look at George Foreman, former heavyweight boxer, who spent many years in the boxing ring, having his head pounded on, but was still able to retire from professional boxing with enough brain power left to name all 30 of his children George. Not only that, but he is also largely credited with developing one of the greatest inventions of the 20^th century: the George Foreman^® Grill. Well, maybe he didn’t actually invent the grill himself, but give the guy some credit for being in boxing that long and still being able to appear in advertisements, without shaking, to promote the George Foreman Grill.

          Just what does it take to be a genius? Next month, we’ll try to find the answer to that question by profiling other people who are often placed in the “genius” category. We’ll also take a look at the different parts of the brain and learn how they function together to make possible such things as Jackass: The Movie (the original and Number Two).

          Until then – don’t do anything stupid.