Rodin’s Thinker had Deep Thoughts

When Rodin began looking for a model to sit for his masterpiece, The Thinker, he asked one of his artist friends to pose.  Rodin specifically requested that the artist think “deep thoughts”, but Rodin did not specify an exact pose that his amateur model should strike. He wanted him to come to a pensive pose naturally. After numerous weeks of trial and error, during which the “model” failed to place his fisted hand on his chin, Rodin grew frustrated. Rodin also noted that the model had grown quite frail, and would hardly eat much; he would spend lots of time chewing. Also, Rodin though the model’s mouth appeared to be open quite a bit on one side. Eventually, after a heated discussion, he fired his “model” friend and replaced him with a philosophy graduate student writing a dissertation on Shintoism. The philosophy graduate student naturally struck the desired pose and would even dine pensively (probably thinking of what food he might be able to afford to eat someday). Thus, he served as the ideal “model” for the now famous The Thinker. Forensic anatomists always suspected, however, that the original artist friend must have suffered a lesion to one of the nerves that precluded the model from adopting the pose. The “friend” would gaze into space, but would not place his hand, or even touch his chin as we often do when gazing off into space to ponder the social implication of the new Barbie movie. Which of the labeled nerves could be a candidate for the friend’s lack of sensation to his chin and the additional symptoms noted by Rodin?

(BTW, all this is apocryphal duh, no one knows who served as the model for Rodin.)

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