The 7 best phrases of Alexander Luria

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

Born in Kazan, Russia, before the Russian Revolution, he developed different studies and investigations that have provided the foundation for this sub-discipline within psychology, in which the brain It is the architect that originates the behavior.

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

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

Famous quotes of Alexander Luria

Born into a family of Jewish origin, Luria was fluent in German, French, English and Russian. Disciple of Lev vygotsky and personal friend of Sigmund Freud, Alexander Luria shared his scientific contributions in more than 350 publications.

Without further ado, we are going to know the famous quotes from him along with a brief contextualization of each of them.

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

Alexander Luria's academic journey is somewhat strange. Contextualizingly, it must be understood that the Russian Revolution happened just at a decisive moment in his formation, at the tender age of 7 years. He entered college at the age of 15 to study psychology.

Phrase 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 endured and the opportunity to study large numbers of brain-injured patients were impressive. 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 injury. The branch of neuropsychology does not have as a means of causing certain injuries to evaluate the effects, but which simply studies existing cases of people who have undergone certain restorative surgeries.

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

The syllogism for phrase 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. He wanted to discover if there was a kind of logical reasoning that was used in all cultures and societies. Curiously, the most common response among the members of that town 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 detectors of lies. And although he was a great scholar of psychophysiology, he also inquired about psychoanalysis and human emotions in search of methods of "complemented motor responses."

4. Talking is a miracle.

A phrase by Alexander Luria in which he shows us his deep interest and admiration for mental processes. Luria conceives of the brain as a holistic entity and, like his professor Lev Vygotsky, I try to to find out the brain functions that, in association with others, form the fundamental basis of the thought. This approach clashes head-on with the postulates of other prestigious academics at the time, like 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 lasted for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Currently, most academics agree that there is a middle ground between the two positions: our brain functions as a system of interrelations, although It is also possible to detect some regions that are responsible for specific mental processes (for example, Broca's area is especially linked to the production of language).

Alexander Luria himself proposed a theory about the organization of the brain at three levels: 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: Brain stem, hypothalamus Y limbic system.
• Information processing and storage: temporal lobe, occipital lobe Y parietal lobe.
• Motor skills and behavioral programming: frontal lobe.

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

Always following Luria, these three levels constitute a functional system that is interrelated. Higher-type functions involve different brain regions and are carried out in a coordinated way.

6. The knowledge that today is had of the brain is relatively small if we compare it with what that we still have to discover and very large if we compared it with what we knew only a few years.

The Russian neuropsychologist was right to comment, in one of his books, that research on mental processes and cerebral is still very recent, and he congratulated himself on the many insights that were being achieved in his epoch. The previous phrase 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 location of the corresponding mental activity, there is still a long way to go.

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