The 7 best quotes by Alexander Luria, the Russian neuropsychologist.

This Russian researcher was the pioneer in the systematic study of brain processes.

Alexander Luria (1902 - 1977), whose official name is transcribed as Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, was the pioneer of modern neuropsychology.

Born in Kazan, Russia, before the Russian Revolution, he developed several studies and researches that have been the foundation for this subdiscipline within psychology, in which the brain is the architect that originates behavior.

In this article we have proposed to make a compilation of phrases of Alexander Luria that will allow us to know better his contributions and his theories.

• Recommended article: "Alexander Luria: biography of the pioneer of neuropsychology".

Alexander Luria's Famous Phrases

Born into a family of Jewish origin, Luria spoke German, French, English and Russian fluently. A disciple of Lev Vygotsky and a personal friend of Sigmund Freud, Alexander Luria shared his scientific contributions in more than 350 publications.

Without further ado, let's get to know his famous quotes along with a brief contextualization of each one of them.

It is difficult to know the reason for my choice of psychology as the field of my immediate professional activity.

Alexander Luria's academic career is somewhat strange. Contextualizing it, it must be understood that the Russian Revolution occurred just at a decisive moment in his formation, at the tender age of 7. He entered the university when he was only 15 years old to study psychology.

Sentence number 1 corresponds to his autobiographical book "Looking back", written in 1979. It is an opinion about his genuine interest in mental mechanisms.

2. The responsibilities we bore and the opportunity to study a large number of brain-injured patients were awesome. Thus, the disaster years provided us with the greatest opportunity to advance science.

In this sentence, Alexander Luria tells us about neuropsychology in people with brain injuries. The branch of neuropsychology does not use the means of provoking certain lesions to evaluate the effects, but simply studies existing cases of people who have undergone certain reparative surgeries.

3. In a certain village in Siberia all the bears are white. Your neighbor went to that village and saw a bear. What color was the bear?

The syllogism of sentence number three became especially popular in his time. Luria described this logical fallacy on one of his trips to visit an indigenous village in central Asia. I wanted to find out if there was a kind of logical reasoning that was used in all cultures and societies. Interestingly, the most common response among the members of that village was, "I don't know, why don't you ask my neighbor?".

Although Luria is widely known for his research and discoveries in patients with acquired brain damage and for the location in the brain of certain mental functions, it is also important to know that he was one of the pioneers in the design of lie detectors. And although he was a great scholar of psychophysiology, he also inquired about psychoanalysis and human emotions in search of methods of "complementary motor responses".

4. Talking is a miracle.

A phrase of Alexander Luria in which he shows us his deep interest and admiration for mental processes. Luria conceived the brain as a holistic entity and, like his teacher Lev Vygotsky, tried to find out the brain functions that, in association with others, form the fundamental basis of thought. This approach clashed head-on with the postulates of other prestigious academics of the time, such as Karl Wernicke or Paul Broca, who were followers of the idea that certain specific regions of the brain corresponded to certain motor and cognitive functions.

This controversy between supporters of localizationism and anti-localizationism continued throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, most scholars agree that there is a middle ground between the two positions: our brain functions as a system of interrelationships, although it is also possible to detect some regions that are in charge of specific mental processes (for example, Broca's area is especially linked to language production).

Alexander Luria himself proposed a theory on the three-level organization of the brain: primary, secondary and tertiary. According to his approach, each brain area, through a complex network of neural connections, is responsible for specific mental functions:

• Waking state, primary memory and internal homeostasis: brainstem, hypothalamus and limbic system.
• Information processing and storage: temporal lobe, occipital lobe and parietal lobe.
• Motor capacity and behavioral programming: frontal lobe.

5. Our mission is not to "localize" man's higher psychological processes in limited areas of the cortex, but to find out, by means of a careful analysis, which groups of concerted work areas of the brain are responsible for the execution of complex mental activity.

Still following Luria, these three levels constitute an interrelated functional system. Higher-level functions involve different brain regions and are carried out in a coordinated manner.

6. Today's knowledge of the brain is relatively small compared to what we still have to discover and very large compared to what we knew only a few years ago.

The Russian neuropsychologist was right to comment, in one of his books, that research on mental and brain processes is still very recent, and he congratulated himself for the numerous insights that were being achieved in his time. The previous sentence by Alexander Luria is a good example of this.

7. In order to progress from the establishment of the symptom (loss of a given function) to the localization of the corresponding mental activity, there is still a long way to go.

Alexander Luria's work has been key to the scientific community's deepening research into the neuropsychological bases of human consciousness. His important discoveries in the field of neuropsychology have resulted in a scientific field of special interest for mental health professionals.