Luria’s Autobiography

Chapter 1

A couple of things stick out in the first chapter of Luria's autobiography. One is the impact of the Revolution on Luria's life. Unlike many of his western colleagues, Luria, in his view, lived through times that were very socially and politically tumultuous, and the effect of those times had a significant effect on his development. Luria was caught up in a chaotic whirlwind of ideas that was very exciting but, as he puts it, "not at all conducive... to systematic, scientific inquiry."

The second thing that sticks out, as Mike pointed out, is Luria's ability to make something out of nothing. In complete social and intellectual chaos, Luria was able to find an interesting and diverse set of intellectual roots. In the midst of extreme shortages, Luria was able to found a journal and print it on borrowed yellow soap-paper.

The two opposed elements that helped shaped Luria's life-long psychological project appear in his early education. On the one hand, there was the early laboratory psychology, associated with both Wundt and Høffding, with its focus on highly controlled conditions, basic mental elements, mental associations. On the other hand, there were the critics of laboratory psychology, including Rickert, Windelband, and especially Dilthey. Dilthey focused on a descriptive approach that attempted to understand individual people as they lived and behaved in the world. Luria's career was shaped by trying to find a middle path, escaping the dichotomy between nomothetic and idiographic thinking in psychology.

Nomothetic: of our relating to the study or discovery of general scientific laws.

Idiographic: relating to or concerned with discrete or unique facts or events

A few other figures appear as early influences, especially psychoanalysis, William James, and Bekhterev and Pavlov. Luria was especially interested in taking the insights of psychoanalysis and attempting to subject them to more objective analysis.

Follow on Comment

Chapter 2

Punchline: Luria made the most of his first professional appointment, designing an experiment that provided objective evidence of subjective mental states.

This chapter outlines Luria's early professionalization and life as an experimental psychologist shortly after the Revolution. In 1923, Luria moved to Moscow at the invitation of Prof. Kornilov of the Moscow Institute of Psychology. Luria claims to have been invited because the institute was in need of experimentally-oriented psychologists open to the materialist lines the Institute was re-orientating itself along in order to conform better to Marxist philosophy. This re-orientation was reflected in the renaming of the individual laboratories to include 'reaction': "All this was meant to eliminate any traces of subjective psychology and to replace it with a kind of behaviorism." (31)

Luria claims ambivalence to this materialist orientation. On the one hand, he believed strongly in objectivity in psychology. On the other hand, the focus on 'reaction' and the distribution of 'mental energy' seemed like an oversimplification of a vastly more complex mental system. In order to address this conflict, Luria devised an experiment that would attempt to incorporate both objective measures of subjects' internal mental states and a more nuanced vision of the human mind. He did so by turning back to his earlier readings in Jungian analysis.

Earlier experimental work had suggested that confusion on the part of a subject was reflected in a disruption of motor tasks; "the smooth curve I usually obtained was distorted in a way that seemed to reflect the subject's uncertainty." (32) The objective reflection of confusion could be combined with psychoanalysis if verbal associative tasks were combined simultaneously with a motor task. If the two occurred simultaneously, then they could be treated as a single functional system, and so distortions in the motor task, which could be measured objectively, could be taken as evidence of internal mental distortion related to the associative task.

Luria worked with Alexei Leontiev (who he had met at the Institute) in the following experiment: research assistants told a story to several subjects, who were told to remember the story, but not to tell anyone that they knew it. Those subjects were then placed into a pool with subjects who had not received the narrative treatment, and were asked to participate in an experiment in which they would squeeze a bulb in their hand (motor function) while responding to a list of seventy words, of which ten were important to the story in the narrative treatment (internal mental distortion), while free-associating (internal mental state). Disruptions of the motor function could then be tracked by exposure to the narrative treatment to determine if an internal mental distortion was taking place; if those subjects told the story reacted differently than the non-treated subjects when the important words were read, then Luria and Leontiev would have evidence regarding their mental states. The experiment was a success, and led to immediate applications in criminal justice.

This application was useful to Luria and Leontiev, because it allowed them access to a population who were experiencing strong, stable emotions: criminals and accused criminals. The presence of strong, stable emotional states was useful to Luria, since psychological experiments frequently had difficulty in producing emotional states that were both strong and stable; strong emotions tended to dissipate. Luria and Leontiev adapted their earlier laboratory experiment to include details of the crime, rather than a story told be assistants.

"One of the first things we discovered is that strong emotions prevent a subject from forming stable, automatic motor and speech responses." (35) This disruption was systemic, rather than localized; this made it difficult to distinguish the criminals from the accused, both of whom had strong, stable emotional states. They finally settled on a process in which the subject was exposed to a variety of stimuli within a single subject. Luria claimed success with this method, although he does not elaborate here on his process for determining what constitutes a subject category.

We see Luria's characteristic modesty from his description of this experiment. Rather than focusing on his ground-breaking ability to find objective measures of subjective mental states, he soft-pedals the experiment, describing it primarily in terms of its use as an early lie-detector.

This modesty may also be the reason that Luria earlier (30) downplays his ability to understand Marxist philosophy, although Mike suggests another possible explanation for this in his excellent introduction. (12) At any rate, the relationship between Luria and Marxism is an important element of this chapter, both in his short discussion on page 30, and also in the nuances of the trend Luria identifies towards objectivity in psychology.
The Autobiography of Alexander Luria

Chapter 3 “Vygotsky”

This chapter opens with the assertion that “… Vygotsky was a genius.” (p38) Luria then describes Vygotsky’s extemporaneous speaking style, for which he required no notes or prepared materials. In class Mike suggested that while this is probably no exaggeration, we need to remember that Luria often underplayed his own contributions, and stood behind others as a way to protect himself from the political violence that was so much a part of his experience. Mike also explained that Luria had a way of being overly self-effacing, in order to signal that, contrary to his modest assertions, he did in fact contribute a lot to the groundbreaking work that he was involved with.

Luria goes on to explain the basic principles for analysis and lab practice that he and Leontiev worked on with Vygotsky. Their focus was to synthesize the two major intellectual tendencies in understanding human psychological processes—coming from the natural and social sciences. What they sought was an experimental practice that could help to uncover the workings of “higher” psychological functioning, an ability to focus on the entire person—not just reflexes, and on the person in a social context. Despite living in difficult circumstances, they worked hard to incorporate and be in touch with a wide range of intellectual influences. Luria asserts that Marxism was the central organizing theory, although also says that he was not an expert Marxist. On Page 42 he talks about Piaget—with whom they had fundamental disagreements, but whose clinical practices were influential for their work.

On Page 44 the three names for this new, synthetic practice are briefly explained—Instrumental, Cultural, and Historical, all three of which were then used in different combinations to describe what they were doing, which was to work from a theory in which “the origins of higher forms of conscious behavior were to be found in the individual’s social relations with the external world.” (p43) “Instrumental” refers to the ability of humans to actively modify their own behavior and cognitive functioning (i.e. tying a string around your finger to remember something). “Cultural” involves the structured way in which society organizes tasks and tools—epitomized in language, the “tool of tools”. “Historical” is not separated from cultural (Mike says “culture in history in the present”). Tools such as language, writing, and arithmetic carry with them the history of the many generations who developed and perfected them.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to describing some of the early experimental work that they did together, which laid the groundwork for the rest of Luria’s career. “The kindergarten and the clinic were equally attractive avenues of approach to the difficult analytic problems.” (p.57, concluding paragraph of the chapter). They studied development and disability/rehabilitation. People in these times function in a less synthetic, holistic way.

This summary will get to be as long as the chapter if I describe all the experiments, but from our class discussion it seems that one really important thing to note is that Vygotsky’s work and theories predicted (helped to found?) the field of neuropsychology—heralding a much more complex understanding of the ways that neurology affects behavior, and the ways that learning and behavior in turn affect the brain. This is detailed on pages 54 and 55.

-Emma

Luria on research methodology, chapter 3

I was especially interested in taking a close look at chapter 3, where Luria capsulizes many of the theories and research ideas of the Vygotsky school that he helped found. I wound up annotating groups of paragraphs in terms of the major themes Luria develops.

Below are my annotations on Luria's pages on research, which Emma could only touch on in her summary (BTW, I liked her summary, and all the summaries, I found them very useful). What is especially interesting about this section of chapter 3, which Luria devotes to the research work they did in the 1920's, is the emphasis he places on the method of studying the influence of auxiliary stimuli in various kinds of behavior, and how this concept underlaid all their experiments.

Auxiliary: supplementary

Making a generalization about this, I would say that this method of finding ways of exposing the use of auxiliary stimuli in cognitive behavior (e.g. studying things like the use of auxiliary stimuli to remember primary inform! ation, use of egocentric speech in planning, use of external rules to control motor behavior such as jumping) exemplified the essential theory of the Vygotsky school, that the development of higher psychological functions was a process of internalization - internalization of external activity, particularly social activity and engagement with tools and language. What each of these experiments had in common was the exposure and analysis of this internalization process by rendering visible the mechanisms involved - the mechanisms of internalizing external, auxiliary stimuli - transforming this stimuli into internal methods (including internal auxiliary stimuli) for the self-guidance of conscious behavior.

pg 45
Experimental arrangements were constantly being explored by the troika. The arrangements incorporated the theory that as higher psychological processes take shape, the structure of behavior changes.
pg 46
A. R. Leontiev studied how auxiliary stimuli can be used to help remember, distinguishing "natural remembering" from remembering stimulated by the use of “auxiliary stimuli." The idea of using two sets of stimuli, one that was supposed to be mastered and another to serve as an instrument to do so, became a central methodological tool in all these studies of memory.
pg 47
Natalia Morozova studied the development of complex choices in small children. The use of auxiliary stimuli was introduced into these choice reaction experiments, and demonstrated that the remembering used in choice reactions required rules governing their acquisition that were similar to those used in mediated remembering that were found in the Leontiev studies.
pg 48
R. E. Levina studied the role of speech in children's problem-solving activity. The role of egocentric speech in carrying out, and as a child gets older, planning an action, was of particular interest. The underlying theory of this work was the same as the other studies - words and speech became methods of self-guidance.
pg 49
Alexander Zaporozhets applied this concept of the internalization of external activity (use of egocentric speech in planning, use of auxiliary stimuli to remember primary information) to motor behavior. In this case, the influence of the use of external rules were applied to children learning how, for example, to control their own jumping.
pg 50
L. S. Sakharov applied this method to the study of how children classify using a block-sorting technique. He discovered that the naming function of words undergoes deep changes as a child develops.
In another line of studies conducted in 1929, "significative" activity in children was studied - ways that children engaged in activities that gave significance to stimuli they were asked to master. In these studies, children were asked to invent pictograms to help them memorize abstract phrases such as "The teacher is angry."
pg 51
There were other experiments.; Individually, all these studies were simplistic. But the concepts behind them laid the methodological foundation for Vygotsky's general theory and provided a set of experimental techniques Luria used throughout his career.
Luria's work on the combined motor method was also an important aspect of the research work done by the Vygotsky school participants. Although Luria began this work with an interest in studying the dynamic course of emotions, Vygotsky saw the combined motor method as a means for studying the relationship between voluntary movements and speech, especially the way speech served as an instrument for organizing behavior.

Steve Gabosh

Cole’s comments
Agree with the centrality of the method of using auxiliary stimuli as THE defining method/theory underlying the cultural historical approach, Steve. It is, not accidentally, the core of Yrjo Engestrom's current intervention research using the phrase, the "method of dual stimulation"
mike

Chapter 4: Cultural Differences in Thinking

Luria begins by noting that one way to study "man's intellectual function" is to compare intellectual activity in different cultures. He cites speculative work in the area by Durkheim, Janet, Levy-Bruhl, Rivers, and Werner but notes that this work was "being conducted without the benefit of any appropriate psychological data" (59). He notes that "a few studies on sensory processes, carried out by trained psychologist at the turn of the century, were available" (59) but this data did not address the higher psychological functions.

Luria saw Vygotsky's work as a framework that unified the phenomenological (descriptive) branches and the natural (explanatory) branches. Given this framework, in the 1930's Luria and Vygotsky planned a study of the "intellectual functions" of adults from "a nontechnological, nonliterate, traditional society". Luria says they sought a society that was undergoing social and technological change. They settled on Uzbekistan and Khirgizia in Central Asia, which were regions of the Soviet Union at the time. Luria describes some of his work in Uzbekistan in this chapter.

The Uzbekistan people he studied were traditionally villages who worked the land of others. They raised cotton and practiced animal husbandry. They were Muslims. Women were isolated from the life of society. In the period of the study, the Revolution of 1917 (and presumably the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922) were causing significant changes in Uzbekistan. One change was the introduction of schooling, another the "collectivization of agriculture" and another the emancipation of women. The area was in a state of transition. Luria studied five groups of people. 1) Illiterate women in remote village who were not involved in the modern ways. 2) Illiterate peasants in remote villages who were not involved with socialized labor. 3) Nearly illiterate women with some training in teaching kindergarteners. 4) Barely literate but experienced collective farm workers. 5) Modestly literate women with training as school teachers (these women had had only two or three years of schooling). He considered that groups 1) and 2) were not exposed to modern ways but groups 3), 4) and 5) were.

His methods "approached a full-fledged experimental inquiry" (62). Much time was taken to make "subjects" comfortable with the experimenters and the type of tests prior to "testing". Field notes were taken during testing. Tests were not standardized but were specially designed to be meaningful to subjects. Each test had multiple possible answers. The following three higher psychological functions were tested: linguistic coding; categorization and abstraction; and verbal problem solving. Luria says, "In each of these areas we discovered a shift in the organization of people's cognitive activity that paralled the changes in the social organization of their work lives" (64).

Linguistic Coding:

Subjects differed in the way they named and grouped geometric stimuli. Subjects who were not illiterate used geometric names like "circle". Subjects who were illiterate used concrete names like "a plate". This had consequences for all the other higher psychological functions. Luria concluded that using geometric names "reflects historically developed and transmitted ways of classifying objects in the world" (66).

Classification and Abstraction:

Luria also called these functions Categorization and Generalization. "Non-modern" subjects tended to not categorize. "Modern" subjects categorized in expected ways. When presented with a set of objects "almost all subjects" tended to group according to practical considerations ("all these objects are needed for chopping") as opposed to using some characteristic of the objects ("all the yellow ones"). For "almost all subjects" grouping was idiosyncractic and resistant to change. For this same group, grouping by abstract characteristics seemed "stupid" (69). The tendency to practical grouping was strongest in the illiterate groups, groups 1) and 2). Mixed results were obtained for groups 3) and 4). Group 5 tended to employ categorical classification even though they had had only a year or two of school. These results were understood to mean that "the primary function of language changes as one's educational experience increases. When people employ a concrete situation as a means of grouping objects, they seem to be using language only to help them recall and put together the components of the practical situation rather than to allow them to formulate abstractions or generalizations about categorical relations" (72). Luria hypothesized that "when people acquired the verbal and logical codes that allowed them to abstract the essential features of objects and assign them to categories, they would also be able to do more complex logical thinking" (74). This was seen in Marxist terms as a "transition from sensory to rational consciousness" (74). Luria believed that theoretical concepts helped by creating a logical system of codes, which he believed develops with thought.

Verbal problem solving/Syllogistic reasoning:

Luria links the same categorization classification approaches to the development of syllogistic reasoning e.g. If one hears "Precious metals do not rust." and "Gold is a precious metal", Syllogistic reasoning would lead one to say "Gold does not rust.". Groups 1) and 2) saw each of the three parts of a syllogism as an isolated judgment even though Luria varied the syllogisms by crafting the statements so that they were about familiar or unfamiliar content. Groups 1) and 2) (and I think also groups 3) and 4)) tended to not exhibit syllogistic reasoning. He notes that groups 1) and 2) made "excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them" and revealed "much worldly intelligence" but in theoretical thinking they were limited. Three problems presented themselves: a mistrust of initial premises; a failure to accept the premises as universal; and syllogisms disintegrating into three isolated propositions devoid of logical structure. Group 5) responded to logical syllogisms in the expected way.

Luria ends by referring to all the work that was not reported in this chapter -- what he calls the "anti-Cartesian experiments". He also studied "problem solving and reasoning (not sure if this is distinct from verbal problem solving mentioned above or not), imagination and fantasy, and the ways in which informants evaluated their own personality" (80). In these studies he found "critical self-awareness to be a product of socially determined psychological development, rather than its primary starting point" (80). He concludes that "basic changes in the organization of thinking can occur in a relatively short time when there are sufficiently sharp changes in social-historical circumstances, such as those that occurred following the 1917 Revolution" (80).

This was a controversial study in its time and I think this is still true today.

Chapter 5: Mental Development in Twins

In the 1930s, Luria was invited to set up a research program at the Medico-Genetic Institute, which gave him unlimited access to twins from all over the USSR. Luria's twin work was different because it did not assess mental functions using the standardized IQ test. Also, he considered not just biological and cultural explanations for differences between twin performance but also explanations that considered age and the nature of the task being examined.

Study 1:

Luria hypothesized that "As a child grows older, natural processes change quantitatively" (82) meaning that "mental processes increase in power but the basic principles of their action remain unchanged" (82). However, "Cultural processes, …. change qualitatively" (83) meaning, I believe, that changes occur in the action of culturally-mediated mental processes over time. Obviously, both natural and cultural processes will be influencing development simultaneously. Giving memory as an example, Luria notes that "the child gradually learns to organize his memory and to bring it under voluntary control through use of the mental tools of his culture" (83). Effectively, Luria distinguishes between "natural cognitive tasks" and "culturally mediated processes" and expects that biological factors have a stable relation to the former but that environmental factors have a changing relation to the latter. Luria considered that natural processes dominant up to 7 years and that cultural processes begin to dominant at 11 years. To test this relation he chose subjects who were 5-7 years old and 11-13 years old. He also selected task that required either natural or cultural psychological processes. He varied genetic factors by comparing identical and fraternal twins in the same environment. Fifty pairs of twins were part of the study and they were evenly spread amongst the two age groups and two types of twins. For tasks, Luria used Leontiev's memory tasks, which tested 1) natural direct remembering of geometric figures, 2) the ability to remember very difficult words, and finally 3) the ability to remember a set of words given a set of signs (one per word). Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Generally, the younger children relied on natural abilities to perform the tasks whereas some of the older children used mediated means, particularly in the third task. Regardless of the child's age he found that identical twins performed more similarly than fraternal twins on natural tasks (1 and possibly also 2 above). The culturally mediated task (task 3) was performed similarly whether the twins were fraternal or natural although the older group was more similar than the younger group.

Study 2:

Luria also noted that identical twins "presented an interesting opportunity to study the effects of environmental variation" (88) by introducing a cultural difference into one twin's life. He used educational games developed from a set of blocks to try to develop one twin's imagination, shape discrimination and ability to estimate visually. Using blocks, he and his colleague Mirenova sought a task that was not too structured and not to open-ended. They designed a learning activity that would give a child a goal but not the solution. They gave children a model of a structure that provided the overall shape or outline of the final structure but didn't specify what blocks to use. Luria felt that building from a partially specified model would develop "perceptual activity" in children (92). He then asked the ten children in his study (5 pairs of identical twins) to build under the three conditions 1) very structured 2) goal-oriented and 3) open-ended. Then one twin of each pair followed a two-month programme using strategy 1) above and the other using strategy 2). When tested at the end of the programme, the twin following programme 2) was superior in building using either the fully-specified models for strategy 1 or the outline models used in strategy 2. Luria asks why and sought an answer by analyzing the model-building process itself. He noticed that the twin in group 2 planned more, had a better sense of the relation of a block to the whole structure and were more articulate when identifying differences between their structure and the model they were working towards.

Then Luria explored the "basis of the initial differences observed" (93). He hypothesized those in group 1) above had "only exercised the children's elementary perception" (94). In further tests he showed both twins in a pair were equally good at discriminating elementary figures and concentrating. Eliminating these possibilities as explanations for the difference he then tested analytic skills. Here he found differences between the ability to analyze the relation between "objects and their spatial configuration" (95), where group 2) was superior. Luria concludes "this research was interesting not only for its general theoretical and educational implications but also for its demonstration that identical twins could serve as especially useful subjects in intensive work with small groups of children" (96).

Study 3:

Luria became interested in the "private" speech of twins. He studied one pair, Yura and Liosha, who had "a complex phonetic impairment" (97). At four they were speaking very little and interacting mostly with each other. At five Luria observed their vocabulary was that of a normal two or three year old and their speech was tightly bound to action. Luria wanted to "modify the level of the children's speech in a short time and by so doing produce a change in their mental functions" (99). During a ten-month programme the twins lived apart. Yura, the weaker twin, was "given speech training to discriminate and articulate sounds and to master adult speech" (99). After three months he found that both boys speech had improved. Both boys were heard uttering planning speech but Lioshas speech was rarely narrative whereas Yura's was not. Luria concluded "the development of planning speech grows out of the activities and interactions that normally occur in kindergarten, but the development of narrative speech seems to need special training at this stage in the child's language development" (101). However, Luria also noticed throughout the course of the study that Yura's planning and narrative speech was qualitatively different since it could apply to objects and actions that were not in the immediate environment. Luria concluded "the necessity to communicate led to the development of objective speech, but special training was required for the children to produce differentiated, well-developed sentences" (101). However, Luria was really interested in how speech affected children's thought processes. Following Vygotsky, he focused on assessing the quality of the children's play. After three months of separation he found "remarkable changes" in free play – games had "an agreed-upon objective" (102). Also, when playing with clay, both boys now worked towards a goal. However, Yura led play requiring verbal formulations and Liosha led games based on motor activity. In more detailed observations Luria noticed that Liosha could not label an object. He had trouble classifying or finding absurdities. Yura "demonstrated that he had learned to use culturally assimilated schemes to organize his thinking" (103).

I love how the questions and direction of these studies were shaped by cultural-historical psychology. I also greatly admire how each of the studies progressed to reveal more fundamental differences. This reflects Luria's remarkable powers of observation.

Chapter 6: Verbal Regulation of Behavior

Pavlovian physiology was a popular explanation for animal and human behavior (by the late 1940s), however Luria found its lab models and
experimental methods to be more useful (than its explanatory power). However, Luria found Pavlovian methods to be too reliant on a simplistic,
mechanistic connection between stimuli and response (by over emphasizing techniques of reinforcement and conditioning); also, the Pavlovian terminology of excitation, inhibition, and plasticity could only describe, but not explain, experimental results.

In early 1950s Luria moved to Institute of fectology, and worked with E.D. Homskaya on, among other things, the issue of how verbal regulation of behavior develop in children (or how children learn to regulate their motor functions based on verbal instructions). [Note: This research is summarized in _Problems in the Higher Nervous Activity of Normal and Abnormal Children_, 2-volumes, pub. 1956 and 1958 in Russian; also, it is
mentioned in _The Role of Speech in the regulation of Normal and Abnormal
Behavior_, 1960 in English.]

The initial series of three experiments used combined motor method to test both normal of different age groups and abnormal children. All three experiments required the subject respond to visual stimuli (or refrain from responding) based on verbal instructions; the first involved motor
responses, the second required verbal responses, and the third involved both motor and verbal responses. The reason motor and verbal responses
were chosen is because each is presumed to be a lower level function and a higher level function respectively; the reason normal and abnormal
children were chosen is because the normal group provides results concerning developmental processes and the other group provides results
involving pathological conditions.

The experiments involved groups of normal children (2 to 2.5 yrs, 3 to 3.5, 3.5 to 4 yrs) and groups of mentally retarded children (one group
with low level problems and one group with high level problems; both groups somewhat older than the normal children). The results of the normal
children showed that at age 3.5 to 4 subject could begin to control their own behavior based on verbal instructions, while younger children could
not, or could only do so sporadically. The results for the abnormal children showed that those with lower level (motor) problems could use their verbal system to overcome their motor difficulties, while those with higher level (verbal and motor) problems did not improve their performance.

These experiments with verbal regulation of behavior in normal and abnormal children provided results apparently confirming a hypothesis about low and high level brain functioning within both developmental processes and within pathological circumstances. Specifically, one of the key findings of this research involves the internalization of verbal
commands for normal children between 3.5 and 4 years of age. The internalization of verbal commands in normal children and the use of
verbal commands to overcome motor deficiency in some abnormal children showed that verbal processes are vital to motor coordination and possibly of extreme importance for complex mental functions in general. However, he warns against over-generalizing from these results due to the laboratory context of the experiments, and he suggests further studies involving observation of natural behaviors.

Luria, Chapter 7

From: "xavier cagigas" (xcagigas@ucsd.edu)

Luria suggests that there are two strategies toward understanding the nature of higher psychological functions: tracing their development and following the course of their dissolution under conditions of localized brain damage. He compares the localization theorists who attempted to relate each mental function to a specific cortical area with the holistic theorists who assumed that the brain functions as a whole to produce the psychological functions expressed in behavior. Using the dialectical method, he goes on to form a synthesis of narrow localization and equi-potentiality with the strategy of investigating “functional systems.”

Using Broca and Wernicke as a foil, he introduces Hughlings Jackson’s view of the brain as a “complex vertical organization.” Summarizing Jackson’s idea that each psychological function has a low (spinal cord/brainstem), middle (sensory/motor cortices), and high level (frontal/subcortical circuits) representation, Luria introduces the inspiration for what would later become his theory of the “3 functional blocks of the brain” as energizing, processing, and planning in function.

Having sketched the scaffolding for functional systems on which he would later draw, Luria launches into detailed descriptions of the functional systems of respiration and movement and the various different physiological ways of achieving the same end. Luria summarizes the two most salient features of a functional system as: a) the presence of an invariant task, performed by variable mechanisms, which bring the process to a constant invariant conclusion and b) the complex composition of a functional system always includes a series of afferent (adjusting) and efferent (effector) impulses.

Having given these examples in physiology, Luria then dives into Vygotsky’s theory that higher psychological functions represent complex functional systems which are mediated in their structure and incorporate historically accumulated symbols and tools. Vygotsky assumed that his historical approach to the development of such psychological processes as active memory, abstract thought, and voluntary actions also held for the principles of their organization on a cerebral level. This followed from the fact that research suggested that the role played by a cerebral region in the organization of a higher psychological process changes during the course of an individual’s development, and also by the fact that in its early stages complex thinking requires a number of external aids for its performance.

Luria gives many clinically rich examples of Vygotsky’s theory of higher cognitive functions guiding the rehabilitation of neurologically damaged individuals with Parkinson’s disease by reorganizing the theoretical functional systems using compensatory aids. This section illustrates the tight coupling between both cortical and extracortical components of the functional systems which subserve higher order cognition and find their nexus in the historically positioned individual.

Luria also advances the idea that “Neuropsychology” represents a synthesis of the scientific method characteristic of his training as a psychologist and the detective-like syndrome analysis of behavioral neurology. In doing so, he challenged the use of “standardized tests of intelligence” which don’t take into account the underlying neurocognitive functional systems and their social historical development, and therefore represent a reified view of “intelligence.”

Immediately following the short section on the shortcomings of either taking a purely “psychological” or “neurological” approach to the study of higher order cognition and on the tail of his short comment on intelligence testing, Luria ingeniously uses “aphasia” as a vehicle for deconstructing a reified construct. By systematically using syndrome analysis to show that there are different forms of “aphasia” and that one must include both the underlying neurodynamic properties as well as the social context in which different symptoms present themselves, Luria fleshed out the unity of the functional systems which drive an activity both in the nervous system and in the social historical world in which individuals are called to act. In the end, however, he states that perhaps if Vygotsky had lived longer he would have been able to expound upon t! his line of research in more depth.

Luria Chapter 8

Neuropsychology in World War II

During WWII, Luria was commissioned to organize a hospital to treat soldiers with brain injuries. He started the project in the Urals, but after three years he was transferred back to Moscow where he continued his work after the war ended. His team was required to diagnose brain lesions and treat complications, as well as develop a rehabilitation program for destroyed functions. Several key points emerge in his discussion of this experience:

Luria emphasizes the close relationship between diagnostic theory and restorative practice (156).

His “intermediate” solution to viewing brain functions as either equally distributed or narrowly localized is “to think of the functional system as a working constellation of activities with a corresponding working constellation of zones of the brain that support the activities” (141).

The process developed to diagnose and treat patients accords with Vygotsky’s theory that a) higher psychological functions can be analysed by tracing the path of their dissolution, and b) these functions have sociohistorical origins (156).

Luria's primary example, which illustrates the above points, is writing – an activity which “clearly could not have been coded in the human brain in a purely organic fashion because it involves the use of man-made tools” (141). Luria demonstrates that the task of writing involves a complex series of processes involving many different zones of the brain. The injured part of the brain can be identified by analyzing the particular problem that manifests in the act of writing. For example, when the tempero-occipital and parietal-occipital regions of the cortex are damaged, the “spatial organization of graphemes is disturbed” (142).

Once the injury was diagnosed, Luria devised a treatment which would use the intact links, as well as external aids, to create a new functional system. For example, in some patients with afferent motor aphasia, the partially-damaged functional system of articulated speech could be retrained by making the articulatory processes conscious: “to get the patient consciously to produce the sound of the letter p, the therapist gives the patient a lighted match, which he instinctively blows out when the flame reaches his fingers” (145). His examples of treatment demonstrate the very concrete methods he developed to reconstruct a damaged function, utilizing such external devices as mirrors, index cards, and diagrams. At the end of the retraining, the patient should be able to function without the external assistance. While clearly there are variations in the degree of rehabilitation possible depending upon the injury, Luria’s innovative treatments helped his patients improve specific problems, such as articulation and spatial functions, and even more generalized disturbances, such as spontaneous thinking.

Summary of Chpt 9.: Mechanisms of the Brain in The Autobiography of Alexander Luria.

After the Second World War, Luria was concerned with two lines of research: gaining a greater understanding of the neurophysiological mechanism underlying the brain structures associated with the specific syndromes and continuing to advance the general understating of higher cortical functions through the use of more sophisticated psychological analyses. The combination of these two lines of research into a single enterprise is represented, as Luria points out, in the term neuropsychology.

As part of this research project Luria studied the neurophysiology of the frontal lobes and the reticular formation. Research on the reticular formation had revealed that excitation of this structure spread in a gradual manner and therefore played a significant role in regulating activation of the cerebral cortex. This realization led to a shift in research focus from “horizontal” relations within specific levels of organization in the central nervous system (CNS) to “vertical” relations among between structures at the surface of the brain and those deep inside. (159) In addition to this change in research orientation, Luria notes a change in the way researchers understood the direction of excitatory influence in brain activation. Whereas earlier work in neurophysiology focused on the flow of CNS signals moving from lower to higher brain structures, later work highlighted the fact that signals also moved in the opposite direction, with higher structures exerting control over lower ones (afferent (ascending) vs. efferent (descending) connections).

To measure specific and non-specific activation by the frontal lobes of the brain as a whole, Luria and his colleagues employed electrophysiological techniques (electroencephalogram) in combination with tests of verbal comprehension. Participants were first habituated to listening to a list of common words. This elicited nonspecific activation. In order to elicit a specific response some words were imbued with “special significance either through being presented in conjunction with mild electrical shocks, or by asking the participants to listen for specific words (162). In this way Luria and his colleagues could examine their electroencephalogram recordings in order to distinguish between specific and non-specific activation in the brain. Confirmation of the central role of the frontal lobes in activation of the cerebral cortex came from studies demonstrating that frontal lobe patients who received instructions to listen for specific words did not showed any change in brain activation when presented with these specific words.

In the second half of the chapter Luria focuses his discussion on neurolinguistics. He introduces two significant influences on his thinking about the relationship between language and the brain. The first is the work of Trubetskoy who emphasized the importance of phoneme perception in language processing. The second was Saussurian linguistics. From Saussure Luria borrowed the distinction between “paradigmatic” (language as a tool for categorizing) and “syntagmatic” (language syntax) aspects of language and applied this distinction in trying to understand language organization in the brain. Luria and his colleagues found that lesions in specific parts of the cortex differentially affected patients’ abilities to speak fluently or to produce speech with coherent relations between individual words.

Luria ends the chapter by emphasizing the importance of motives and context in the organization of an individual’s speech. He cites Goldstein who argued that naming objects and word repetition did not form the basis of natural speech; rather “the basic form of speech communication is the formulation of ideas as whole propositions which are intimately bound up with the motives and conditions of the activity in which the individual is engaged,” (171).