July 16: Alexander Luria, the founder of neuropsychology, was born
Alexander Luria was born on July 16, 1902, in Kazan. He was a psychologist, neurologist, and one of the founders of neuropsychology—the science that studies the connection between the brain and the psyche. He is also known as the author of the method that formed the basis of Soviet lie detectors.
Words double the world and allow a person to mentally manipulate objects even in their absence. A person who is told that the water in a well is poisoned will never drink it.
Family and education
Luria came from an intelligent Jewish family: his father was a private physician, his mother a dentist. He graduated from Kazan University in 1921.
"Lie Detector" before the lie detector
In the late 1920s, Luria proposed a method for criminologists to identify "affective traces of crime." It was on this basis that the first "lie detectors" were created in the USSR in the 1960s. The scientist tracked hidden stress through bodily reactions: by how subjects responded to stimulus words—neutral and crime-related—and pressed pneumatic buttons, he inferred an "affective trace." Emotions and tension led to speech slurs, delayed responses, and even micro-seizures.
We must evoke the central process of behavioral disorganization and try to reflect this process in some system accessible for study—such a system, first of all, is motor skills.
From Kharkov to the front
In the early 1930s, Luria headed the psychology department at the Kharkiv Psychoneurological Academy and worked at Moscow research institutes in the fields of medicine, biology, genetics, defectology, and neurosurgery. During the Great Patriotic War, he headed a large neurosurgical evacuation hospital near Chelyabinsk. Together with a team of approximately 30 staff members, he examined wounded patients with head injuries and rehabilitated them, including through occupational therapy. For this work, Luria was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. Subsequently, it was his observations of wounded patients and their brain dysfunctions that allowed him to formulate the fundamental tenets of neuropsychology and receive the Lomonosov Prize.
Vygotsky's student
After the war, Luria worked at Moscow State University and the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery in Moscow. He was one of the founders of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society and the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow University. He was a student and colleague of Lev Vygotsky, researching the system of higher mental functions, as well as heredity and variability in their development in humans, demonstrating the crucial role of society and upbringing.
A person receives a huge number of stimuli, but they select the most important ones and ignore the rest. They have the potential to make a large number of possible movements, but they select the few meaningful movements that are part of their actions and inhibit the rest.
Aphasia and exam stress
Luria observed children with developmental disabilities and developed the most well-known classification in Russia of aphasic disorders—speech impairments that arise from damage to various areas of the cerebral cortex. Speech, he said, is the primary tool of our memory. He also described any exams as stressful, during which thought processes are inhibited and health is harmed.
The exam not only causes an acute affective state, it deeply and long-term hystericalizes the examinee.
Discoordination of basic processes, a slowing of associative activity to the extent we encounter in children and the mentally retarded, and speech impairments—these are the phenomena that exam situations cause. Finally, exams taint a student's lifeblood, not just figuratively, but literally.
If there were an examination that gave or took away the right to life, none of us could perform at all satisfactorily on it.
Shereshevsky's phenomenal memory
For 30 years, Luria researched the mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky and his phenomenal memory, writing about it, “A Little Book about a Big Memory.”
Many of us think: how to find ways to remember better. No one works on the question: how to forget better?
Confession and Death
By the end of his life, Alexander Luria had a reputation as a world-class scholar: he was an honorary member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and European psychological societies and universities. He died in 1977 in Moscow, at the age of 75.
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