The 7 Best Phrases Of Alexander Luria, The Russian Neuropsychologist
Alexander Luria (1902 – 1977), whose official name is transcribed as Aleksandr Románovich Lúriya, was the pioneer of modern neuropsychology.
Born in Kazan, Russia, before the Russian Revolution, he developed different studies and research that have been the foundation for this subdiscipline within psychology, in which the brain is the architect that originates behavior.
In this article We have decided to make a compilation of phrases by Alexander Luria that will allow us to better understand their contributions and theories.
Born into a family of Jewish origin, Luria spoke German, French, English and Russian fluently. A disciple of Lev Vygotsky and personal friend of Sigmund Freud, Alexander Luria shared his scientific contributions in more than 350 publications.
Without further ado, let’s get to know his famous quotes along with a brief contextualization of each of them.
1. It is difficult to know the reason for my choice of psychology as the field of my immediate professional activity.
Alexander Luria’s academic journey is somewhat strange. Contextually, it must be understood that the Russian Revolution occurred precisely at a decisive moment in his formation, at the tender age of 7 years. He entered university at just 15 years old to study Psychology.
Sentence number 1 corresponds to his autobiographical book “Looking Back”, written in 1979. It is an opinion about his genuine interest in mental mechanisms.
2. The responsibilities we endured and the opportunity to study large numbers of brain-injured patients were impressive. Thus, the years of disaster provided us with the greatest opportunity to advance science.
In this sentence, Alexander Luria tells us about neuropsychology in people with brain injuries. The branch of neuropsychology does not aim to cause certain injuries to evaluate the effects, but simply studies existing cases of people who have undergone certain reconstructive surgeries.
3. In a certain town in Siberia all the bears are white. Your neighbor went to that town and saw a bear. What color was the bear?
The syllogism of phrase number three became especially popular in its time. Luria described this logical fallacy on one of his trips to visit an indigenous village in central Asia. He wanted to discover if there was a kind of logical reasoning that was used in all cultures and societies. Curiously, the most common response among the members of that town was: “I don’t know, why don’t you ask my neighbor?”
Although Luria is widely known for his research and discoveries in patients with acquired brain damage and for the location of certain mental functions in the brain, it is also important to know that he was one of the pioneers in the design of lie detectors. And although he was a great student of psychophysiology, he also investigated psychoanalysis and human emotions in search of methods of “complemented motor responses.”
4. Speaking is a miracle.
A phrase by Alexander Luria in which he shows us his deep interest and admiration for mental processes. Luria conceives of the brain as a holistic entity and, like his professor Lev Vygotsky, tried to find out the brain functions that, in association with others, form the fundamental basis of thought. This approach clashes head-on with the postulates of other prestigious academics at the time, such as Karl Wernicke or Paul Broca, who were followers of the idea that certain specific regions of the brain corresponded to certain motor and cognitive functions.
This controversy between supporters of localizationism and antilocalizationism remained for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Currently, most academics agree that there is a middle ground between both positions: our brain functions as a system of interrelationships, although it is also possible to detect some regions that are responsible for specific mental processes (for example, the Broca’s area is especially linked to language production).
Alexander Luria himself proposed a theory about the three-level organization of the brain: primary, secondary and tertiary. According to his approach, each brain area, through a complex network of neuronal connections, is responsible for specific mental functions:
5. Our mission is not to “locate” man’s higher psychological processes in limited areas of the cortex, but to find out, through careful analysis, which groups of concerted work areas of the brain are responsible for the execution of complex mental activity.
Always following Luria, these three levels constitute a functional system that are interrelated. Higher type functions involve different brain regions and are carried out in a coordinated manner.
6. The knowledge we have about the brain today is relatively small if we compare it with what we still have to discover and very large if we compare it with what we knew only a few years ago.
The Russian neuropsychologist was correct when he commented, in one of his books, that research regarding mental and brain processes is still very recent, and he congratulated himself on the numerous knowledge that was being achieved in his time. The previous phrase by Alexander Luria is a good example of this.
7. In order to progress from the establishment of the symptom (loss of a given function) to the localization of the corresponding mental activity, there is still a long way to go.
The work of Alexander Luria has been key in allowing the scientific community to delve deeper into the investigation of the neuropsychological bases of human consciousness. His important discoveries in the field of neuropsychology have resulted in a scientific field of special interest to mental health professionals.
