Alexander Luria

Alexander Romanovich Luria (Алекса́ндр Рома́нович Лу́рия; 16 July 1902 – 14 August 1977) was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology.

He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological tests during his clinical work with brain-injured victims of World War II, which are still used in various forms.

He made an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions and integrative processes of the brain in general.

During his career Luria worked in a wide range of scientific fields at such institutions as the Academy of Communist Education (1920-1930s), Experimental Defectological Institute (1920-1930s, 1950-1960s, both in Moscow), Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy (Kharkiv, early 1930s), All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, and the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery (late 1930s).

From the late 1920s until his death, Luria sought to elaborate this synthetic, cultural-historical psychology in different content areas of psychology.

He entered Kazan University at the age of 16 and obtained his degree in 1921 at the age of 19.

He studied in this period under the logician Nicolai A. Vasiliev, who also taught psychology at the same university.

While still a student, he established the Kazan Psychoanalytic Association, and planned on a career in psychology.

His earliest research sought to establish objective methods for assessing Freudian ideas about abnormalities of thought and the effects of fatigue on mental processes.

In 1923 his use of reaction time measures to study thought processes in the context of work settings won him a position at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow where he developed a psychodiagnostic procedure he referred to as the "combined motor method" for diagnosing individual subjects' thought processes.

In 1924 Luria met Lev Semionovich Vygotsky, whose influence was decisive in shaping his future career.

In the early 1930s he led two expeditions to Central Asia where he investigated changes in perception, problem solving, and memory associated with historical changes in economic activity and schooling.

During this same period he carried out studies of identical and fraternal twins raised in a large residential school to reveal the dynamic relations between phylogenetic and cultural-historical factors in the development of language and thought.

In the late 1930s, largely to remove himself from public view owing to the period of purges initiated by Stalin, Luria entered medical school where he specialized in the study of aphasia, retaining his focus on the relation between language and thought in a politically neutral arena.

The onset of World War 2 made his specialized knowledge of crucial importance to the Soviet war effort, and the tragic widespread availability of people with various forms of traumatic brain injury provided him with voluminous materials for developing his theories of brain function and methods for the remediation of focal brain lesions.

It was during this period that he developed the systematic approach to brain and cognition which has come to be known as the discipline of neuropsychology.

In this method (described in detail in Luria, 1932), subjects are asked to carry out three tasks simultaneously.

One hand is to be held steady while the other is used to press a key or squeeze a rubber bulb in response to verbal stimuli presented by the experimenter, to which the subject is asked to respond verbally with the first word to come to mind.

Preliminary trials are presented until a steady baseline of coordination is established.

At this point, "critical" stimuli which the experimenter believes to be related to specific thoughts in the subject are presented.

Evidence for the ability to "read the subject's mind" is the selective disruption of the previously established coordinated system by the critical test stimuli.

This method was applied to a variety of naturally occurring and experimentally induced cases, providing a model system for psychodiagnosis that won widespread attention in the west when it was published.

Luria's magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (1962), is a much-used psychological textbook which has been translated into many languages and which he supplemented with The Working Brain in 1973.

It is less known that Luria's main interests, before the war, were in the field of cultural and developmental research in psychology.

He became famous for his studies of low-educated populations of nomadic Uzbeks in the Uzbek SSR arguing that they demonstrate different (and lower) psychological performance than their contemporaries and compatriots under the economically more developed conditions of socialist collective farming (the kolkhoz).

He was one of the founders of Cultural-Historical Psychology and a colleague of Lev Vygotsky.

Apart from his work with Vygotsky, Luria is widely known for two extraordinary psychological case studies: The Mind of a Mnemonist, about Solomon Shereshevsky, who had highly advanced memory; and The Man with a Shattered World, about Lev Zasetsky, a man with a severe traumatic brain injury.

Together with Vygotsky and Alexei Nikolaivitch Leontiev, Luria sought to establish an approach to psychology that would enable them to "discover the way natural processes such as physical maturation and sensory mechanisms become intertwined with culturally determined processes to produce the psychological functions of adults" (Luria, 1979, p. 43).

Vygotsky and his colleagues referred to this new approach variably as "cultural," "historical," and "instrumental" psychology.

These three labels all index the centrality of cultural mediation in the constitution of specifically human psychological processes, and the role of the social environment in structuring the processes by which children appropriate the cultural tools of their society in the process of ontogeny.

An especially heavy emphasis was placed on the role of language, the "tool of tools" in this process: the acquisition of language was seen as the pivotal moment when phylogeny and cultural history are merged to form specifically human forms of thought, feeling, and action.

Central to his approach was the belief that "to understand the brain foundations for psychological activity, one must be prepared to study both the brain and the system of activity" (1979, p. 173).

This insistence on linking brain structure and function to the proximal, culturally organized, environment provides the thread of continuity between the early and later parts of Luria's career.

Following the war Luria sought to continue his work in neuropsychology.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Luria as the 69th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Needs to be rephrased:

The following is cited from A.R. Luria Biography by Michael Cole

Alexander Luria was born in Kazan, an old Russian University town east of Moscow.

The book describing these studies was published in Russian only in 2002, owing to its association with psychoanalytic theorizing which was disapproved of by Soviet authorities.