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p Alexander Luria

p The world pours, through a large funnel as it were, in thousands of stimuli, drives and callings; inside the funnel are constant struggles and clashes; all the excitations issue from the narrow end as response reactions of the organism in greatly reduced quantity. The actualised behaviour is but an infinitesimal part of the possible behaviour. Man is full of unrealised opportunities at any given moment. These unrealised opportunities for behaviour, the disparity between the broad and narrow ends of the funnel is an indisputable reality, just as real as the reactions which have prevailed.

p Lev Vygotsky

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p LURIA, Alexander (1902-1977), Full Member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogy, Dr. Sc. (Psychology and Medicine), Professor, one of the most prominent Soviet psychologists, widely known in the USSR and abroad as the founder of a new field of psychology—neuropsychology, which has been burgeoning in the last few decades.

p During his fruitful scientific career, which spanned more than fifty years, Luria made an exceedingly valuable contribution to the development of various fields of Soviet psychology. One of his early works, devoted to affective states and involving the use of the "conjugate motor and verbal response method" he himself devised, began a whole series of studies into these states both at home and abroad. Almost concurrently, in the 1920s, Luria, in close collaboration with Vygotsky and Leontiev, developed the theory of the cultural-historical development of the psychic processes which subsequently became widely known and was adopted by many psychologists. In the 1930s, while studying genetic psychology, notably, the role of genetic and social factors in the mental development of twins, Luria demonstrated the importance of speech in organising the various mental processes of children, in particular in organising the voluntary movements and behaviour.

p In 1940, Luria embarked on his studies of the cerebral mechanisms of mental processes that earned him world-wide recognition. As a result of many years of investigations into various mental disorders involving local brain damage, he created a neuropsychological trend in Soviet psychology which is of great theoretical and practical significance. He made a valuable contribution to the development of the theory of dynamic systems localisation of higher psychic functions, has conducted extensive studies into various 132 kinds of aphasia, created new classifications for aphasic disturbances, described new forms of speech disorders previously unknown in neurology, and proposed a neurolinguistic approach to the treatment of aphasia.

p Luria and his colleagues have produced useful multifaceted analyses of the role of the frontal lobes of the brain in regulating mental processes.

p Great credit is due Luria for his studies of the memory processes in the course of treating local brain damage. He described various forms of mnemonic disorders due to injuries of deep brain structures and the cortex.

p Proceeding from systematic investigations of the brain correlates of higher psychic functions, Luria proposed valuable methods of neuropsychological diagnosis of localised brain damage and formulated basic principles for the restoration of disturbed psychic processes now successfully used in this country and abroad.

p Luria did much fruitful work in the field of studies of the handicapped. He presided over the study of the higher neural activity of handicapped children and proposed new objective methods of testing and selecting children for special schools. On many occasions, he represented Soviet study of the handicapped abroad and did much to raise its international prestige.

p Luria left us an amazingly large legacy. He published over 300 scientific works, including a number of fundamental monographs published here and in translation abroad (in the USA, Britain, some Latin American countries, the GDR, Poland, Denmark and Yugoslavia). His largest body of works deals with neuropsychology (Traumatic Aphasia, Restoration of Brain Functions After War Injuries, Higher Cerebral Cortical Functions of Man, Man’s Brain and Mental Processes, Neuropsychology of Memory, A Little Book About a Big Memory, A World Lost and Regained, Basic Problems ofNeurolinguistics). His book Thought and Speech was published posthumously.

p Luria was the editor of several collections: Problems of Higher Neural Activity in Normal and Handicapped Children, The Frontal Lobes and Regulation of Mental Processes; since 1968 there have been annual publications of a collection of monographs on neuropsychology under the heading Neuropsychological Investigations.

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p In 1967, Luria was awarded the Lomonosov Prize for his work in neuropsychology.

p Beginning in 1923 Luria taught extensively and successfully in various higher educational institutions of the USSR. For several years he taught at the Krupskaya Academy of Communist Education and the Moscow Institute for the Study of the Handicapped, and from 1945 until his death was a full professor at Moscow University and read general psychology and neuropsychology. In 1973 a special course on general psychology for university-level teachers (at the refresher department) was added to his teaching load. In 1975, his four-volume manual on general psychology was published.

p Luria was a member of the editorial board of Voprosy Psikhologii journal since its founding and of the editorial boards of some scholarly journals abroad. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Psychological Science for several years and then became its Vice-President. He took part in many international and national congresses, conferences and symposia where his reports and lectures invariably enjoyed success. Luria was very active in the administrative field. As a member of the Central Council of the Psychological Society of the USSR, he attended all its congresses.

p Luria enjoyed high international standing. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Pedagogy, an honorary member of many psychological societies abroad (the British, French, Swiss, Spanish, etc.), and held honorary doctorates from the universities of Leicester (Britain), Neumetry (Holland), Lublin (Poland), Tampere (Finland) and Brussels (Belgium).

p In the middle of May 1978, I received a letter in Russian from the Rockefeller University in which Professor Michael Cole, Director of the Laboratory of Comparative Study of Human Cognition, informed me that he and his wife Sheila, a journalist, were in the process of editing the autobiography of Alexander Luria and that they hoped to finish the work in two or three months and would then send the text to Moscow for Soviet psychologists to make the 134 necessary corrections. “I would be very pleased,” wrote Professor Cole, “if you, too, could find time to read the manuscript. In the course of your numerous talks with Luria you must have gotten a good idea about his work and your remarks could help make the story more accurate.”

p Now that Americans can read this book, in which one of the major Soviet psychologists looks back on his scientific career spanning more than half a century, (it is entitled The Making of Mind and has been published by Harvard University Press), I want to tell you about this unusual man and quote some of what, with his characteristic modesty, he did not include in his autobiography.

p Several years ago, Michael Cole himself interviewed the man who had guided him during his training at Moscow University and whom he had since visited more than once to seek advice and assistance and to discuss his scientific papers. His first question to Professor Luria was this, “Of all contemporary Soviet psychologists, you are perhaps the best known in the United States. How did this come about?" Later Amerika magazine (No. 1, 1977) carried a feature on the mechanisms of the brain which opened with the words: “The past century has produced a galaxy of geniuses who studied the brain. The best known of them are I. P. Pavlov, Sir Charles Sherrington, Sir John Eccles, A. R. Luria, Wilder Penfield, and Karl Pribram.” Luria shunned publicity, and he avoided answering Cole’s question, later complaining to me over the telephone that his name had been ranked with those of the great scientists Pavlov and Sherrington. Be that as it may, his works are required reading for brain specialists. “He has managed to accomplish what very few have accomplished—to create, consolidate and disseminate a whole new scientific definition, a new branch of knowledge, neuropsychology.” These were the words with which Professor Leontiev concluded his preface to the reminiscences of Luria published in the Moscow magazine Znaniye—sila (Knowledge Is Power).

I was fortunate enough to have known Luria rather intimately for several years. This little documentary story is about him and his work.