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Filed in jars and chopped into fine pieces, it still retains the power to inspire astonishment and awaken scientists' curiosity.
After his death on April 18, 1955, Einstein's body was cremated ... but not all.
"When I first heard the story of Albert Einstein's brain, I thought it was an urban legend, because it was too weird to be true," recalls Michael Paternini, author of "Strolling with Mr. Albert: A Journey to across the US with Einstein's brain. "
After the death of the scientist, the brain was separated from the rest of the body with the intention of analyzing it to discover the key to its genius.
It was the American pathologist Thomas Harvey who managed to keep the brain of the father of the Theory of Relativity, probably without the consent of the family.
"I heard for the first time the story of Albert Einstein's brain as an urban legend too weird to be true." Michael Paternini, journalist
Paternini, interested in history, managed to find the pathologist when he was already an 84-year-old man.
After getting his brain, Harvey had managed to take it home and store it in a large glass jar.
But the years went by and Harvey's promise, repeated over and over again, that he would reveal the keys to the brain of one of the geniuses of history did not bear fruit.
With the brain in the trunk
Harvey received a lot of criticism for his disordered methods and for not achieving any kind of scientific result.
"He cut parts of the brain and started sending them to anatomy experts, but the results over the years were not conclusive," says Paternini.
"The articles that were published had no effect," he explains.
"He did not look like the right man for the job, if ever someone had given him his OK to do it," says the journalist.
After finding Harvey, Paternini and he embarked on a journey through the United States in search of Einstein's daughter and with her father's brain in the trunk, an experience that the journalist captured in his book.
"The Harvey that I knew was a kind and gentle person," says Paternini.
But also taciturn and reserved. "The trip lasted 6,400 kilometers, but I felt like there were 16,000."
Harvey fell into deep silences and could spend the time it took to travel a whole State without speaking.
The journalist believes that it was the strategy devised by the pathologist in response to the criticisms he had received throughout his life.
"I was interested in his underlying motives, Harvey believed that he was doing something important, protecting and preserving the brain for the benefit of future generations," says the journalist.
The pathologist died in 2007 without publishing any research on Einstein's brain, but his effort was not entirely in vain.
Harvey took pictures of the brain and cut it into 240 slices to be observed under a microscope, which he sent to the leading American neuropathologists of his time.
But these did not correspond with great discoveries.
However, after the appearance of an article about Harvey in a magazine in the summer of 1978, things started to change.
The journalists camped in the garden of their house and the magazine Science interviewed the doctor.
Scientific advances
One of the researchers who asked for samples of Einstein's brain was Marian Diamond, from the University of California, Berkeley.
With it began the era of studies of Einstein's brain.
The article published by Diamond in 1985 said that Einstein had more glial cells per neuron than the control group used in the experiment.
These cells are responsible for performing a function of support for neurons.
The article reaffirmed the idea that Einstein's brain had some peculiarity that was behind the genius of the scientist.
More recently, in 2012, Frederick Lepore, professor of neurology at Rutgers University and anthropologist Dean Falk of the University of Florida, were able to study some never-before-seen photos of Einstein's brain.
"He's an exceptional brain, but not because of his size, he weighed 1,230 grams, which for a 76-year-old man (Einstein's age when he died) is not exceptionally large," Lepore told the BBC.
"But when you examine the photos, you have a very extraordinary anatomy," said the scientist.
Most people have three prefrontal turns, while Einstein had four by having an extra one in his middle frontal lobe.
The turns are the elevations of the brain surface that occur when the cortex is folded. They are separated by furrows.
"It has many other (different) things - all of its brain lobes are different from normal anatomy."
Lepore and Falk published their research in the journal Brain.
Sandra Witelson, of the University of McMaster (Canada), had examined the anatomy of Einstein's cerebral cortex in 1999 and, according to Falk, it was she who spread the idea that Einstein was a "parietal genius".
Witelson said that Einstein's lower parietal lobe was wider than normal and seemed better integrated. And that is the part of the brain responsible for spatial knowledge and mathematical thinking.
But science is revising itself.
"With all the photos we could see all the lobes from all perspectives, and we saw that yes, the parietal lobes were exceptionally large, but so were the temporal lobes, occipital lobes, the frontal lobe, etc.", says Lapore.
Brain activity
One of the questions surrounding this question is whether Einstein was born with these brain characteristics or they developed after a life dedicated to complex thoughts.
People are born with specific convolutions in the brain, but we do not know to what extent they are influenced by experience and practice.
Falk and his team insist that Einstein's brain is exceptional, but they are willing to admit that it is impossible to relate these anatomical differences to Einstein's genius with certainty.
"If you put me against the wall and ask me where the theory of special relativity came from, where did the theory of general relativity come from, we have no idea," he concludes.
"Einstein had a career very different from the rest, we do not know what effect it has on the structure of your brain to spend 20 or 30 years of your life thinking about complex mathematical problems, it is very difficult to separate cause and effect", explains James Gallagher , Health editor of the BBC.
"In addition, we are talking about just one brain of a genius, if I had the ones of 100 Nobel prizes and all shared a functional difference, we could say something with more security".
On the other hand, there is a limit to what can be done with the remains of a brain. If Einstein were still alive, the scientists would proceed very differently.
"We would be analyzing the activity in different areas of your brain when different tasks are developed," says Gallagher.
Today we could analyze the activity of individual neurons, thousands of them at the same time, to obtain "much more detail than the brain does actively, not only the aspect it has"