A. R. Luria, <cite>The Man with a Shattered World</cite>
[``autoneurography'' of a Soviet soldier who suffered severe brain damage
during the Great Patriotic War, with commentary and medical explanations by
Luria];


<title>A. R. Luria, The Working Brain</title>
<a href="../"><cite>Bactra Review</cite></a>&#160;<tt>
</tt>&#160;<tt> </tt> <cite>The Working Brain</cite>
<hr>
<h1><cite>The Working Brain</cite></h1>
<h2>An Introduction to Neuropsychology</h2>
<h2><em>by</em> A. R. Luria</h2>
<h4>translated by Basil Haigh</h4>
New York: Basic Books and Penguin Books (n.p.), 1973
<hr>
For the last century, there has been an unwritten law, compelling the authors
of texts in what we now call ``the neurosciences'' to begin with some such
statement as ``Most of what we now know about the brain has been discovered in
the last thirty years.''  (It's frightening that this seems to be true.)  Why
then dig up a book from twenty years in the past?

Neuropsychology, as Luria conceived of it, was the science which correlated
psychological functions with particular parts of the nervous system.  Its
roots, therefore, go back to the so-called ``classical neurology'' of the
nineteenth century, which began the first studies of localization.  Since that
beginning, the major tool of the neuropsychologist has been the brain-lesion,
i.e. the destruction of part of the brain.  The ideal lesion is not just small
enough that its recipient lives long enough to undergo neuropsychological
examination, but extremely localized, so that it does not cut across several
functional regions at once.  Some tumors and strokes are so obliging, but the
real boon to the neuropsychologist was the invention of modern rifles in the
nineteenth century.  Thus we see the first stirrings of neuropyschology in this
country, after the Civil War, and in Europe after the Franco-Prussian War.
Luria's school, in Russia, benefited immensely from the Great Patriotic War.

[textbook of neuropsychology, which for Luria means attempting to correlate
mental processes with neural activity, paying special attention to losses of
function caused by brain damage.  I can't say how the original read in Russian,
of course, but the English is somewhat jargony, and suffers from the ``In this
section we will show that; in this section we are showing this; in this section
we have shown that'' syndrome.

I am not sure how to evaluate Luria's repeated statements that cognition is, in
origin and so ``basically'' ``social.''  For instance, in the interesting
chapter on attention, he claims it is social, because infants learn what to
attend to from their parents.  This in particular seems faulty, because without
an innate disposition to attend to their parents, who could this process even
start?  In any case, what I want to know is how much of this was simply
ideological cover, which we can just ``divide through,'' and how much is a
genuine theory to be seriously considered.]

<hr><br>Currently in print as a paperback, ~US$16.50 as of early 1995, ISBN
0-465-09208-X, LoC QP360 L8713

<br>Note: The official Library of Congress transliteration of the author's
name, i.e. the one typically used in library catalogs, is Aleksandr Romanovich
Luriia.

<hr>