gwern comments on Open thread, Oct. 20 - Oct. 26, 2014 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: MrMind 20 October 2014 08:12AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (269)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 26 October 2014 10:33:57PM 4 points [-]

It's been a very long time since I read Lenin's Embalmers, but the brain seems to be in pretty bad shape these days:

No one seems to know what's happened to Lenin's heart, but Soviet ideologists were sure that his brain was something special. They brought in a renowned German scientist to examine it for clues to the great man's genius, but nothing came of it. The brain is still kept at a Moscow institute. "But it's not easy to see it," Zbarsky said. "It's mostly dissected."

Or http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2010/09/the-curious-and-complicated-history-of-lenins-brain/