During the year 2002, on the occasion of thecentenary of the birth of Aleksandr Romanovich Luria,various congresses were organized to honour theeminent Russian psychologist and neuropsychologist.In Amsterdam, Bremen, Florence and Moscow (toname just a few of the locations) what mostimpressed the participants was the wide variety ofpapers which concerned very different areas ofbrain and mind sciences. Each speaker touchedupon a certain aspect of the work of Luriadepending on the way in which he or she had beenfamiliar with his research: as pupil and/or co-worker, or as psychologist or neuropsychologist, oras an historian of psychology, neuropsychology orRussian culture. The impression, renewed at thosemeetings, is that when only a part of his vast andcomplex scientific activity is taken into account oneruns the risk of simplifying Luria’s theoretical andmethodological contributions. The biography,written by his pupil and co-worker Evgenia D.Homskaya (2001), gives us a sufficiently well-informed and well-constructed picture of Luria’sscientific career. The index itself helps us to singleout “the stages of the journey undertaken” (as theRussian title of Luria’s autobiography says): co-working with Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) and thefoundation of the cultural-historical school (theTwenties), cross-cultural research, expedition toCentral Asia, and studies on twins (the Thirties), the war, the front and the first works on brain-injured patients (the Forties), research on mentallyretarded children, brain injuries and rehabilitation(the Fifties), the systematic development ofneuropsychological research (the Sixties and theSeventies). When Luria died in 1977, he wasespecially focusing on the problem of single-caseapproach in neuropsychology. However it isdifficult to get an integrated idea of the scientificand cultural activity of Luria from his

autobiography or from the monographs up to nowwritten on him. There is often the sensation of afragmentation of Luria’s work: seeing him asmoving from developmental psychology toneuropsychology; from the child, generally normal,to the adult, generally brain-injured. Moreover someimportant theoretical and methodological aspects,concerning the first works by Luria in the Twentiesand Thirties, are not adequately treated. We referfirst of all to the significance of the first great book,The Nature of Human Conflicts, published directlyin English in 1932 and in Russian only in 2002.Luria devotes to this work rather less than one pagein his autobiography (1977) and Homskaya (2001)does the same, with neither of the authors making itclear that in this book of more than 400 pages thereis already outlined a precise project unifying thenormal dimension and the pathological one, theclinical investigation and the experimental one.Recently a collection of Luria’s early writings wasedited amongst which was published for the firsttime the essay written by Luria at the age of 19 entitled originally Principles of Real Psychology(on Some Trends of Contemporary Psychology)(Luria, 2003). This one-hundred-page work isimpressive for both the wealth of knowledge of thepsychology, philosophy and sociology of the time,as well as the theoretical perspective which preludesthe future cultural-historical school. When Luriawrites about the “historical-social foundations” ofpsychological processes, he holds as theoreticalreference the debate within German philosophy(Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey, etc.) on thedistinction between the sciences of nature and thehuman sciences, between the nomothetic approachand the idiographic one, as well as the sociologicalcontributions (in particular that of Durkheim); whenhe writes about the relationships between basic andclinical psychology the reference is to Freud, Jung

Cortex, (2005) 41, 816-822

HISTORICAL PAPER

LURIA: A UNITARY VIEW OF HUMAN BRAIN AND MIND

Luciano Mecacci

(Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Italy)

ABSTRACT

Special questions the eminent Russian psychologist and neuropsychologist Aleksandr R. Luria (1902-1977) dealt within his research regarded the relationship between animal and human brain, child and adult mind, normal and pathological,theory and rehabilitation, clinical and experimental investigation. These issues were integrated in a unitary theory ofcerebral and psychological processes, under the influence of both different perspectives active in the first half of theNineteenth century (psychoanalysis and historical-cultural school, first of all) and the growing contribution ofneuropsychological research on brain-injured patients.

Key words: neuropsychology (history), animal brain, development, single case, rehabilitation

and Adler. So it is clear, as has already been pointedout regarding Vygotsky (van der Veer and Valsiner,1991), that the cultural-historical theory has rootsmore complex than the simple application ofhistorical and dialectical materialism to theproblems of psychology. When Luria and Vygotskybegin, probably also under the political andideological pressures of the time, to refer to and toquote Marx and Engels’ texts, they do so within amore complex theoretical framework. Surely it wasthis theoretical and cultural background that madeVygotsky’s school “suspicious” for the officialideology of Stalin’s time, eventually causing it to becondemned and to decline until its rehabilitation atthe end of the Fifties. Moreover it must beremembered that Luria, who belonged to a well-offand educated Jewish family, was a friend of leadingfigures of pre- and post-revolutionary Russianculture (he had a close friendship with the directorSergei M. Eisenstein), and up until his death he wasone of the few Russian scientists who had thepossibility of being in direct contact with Westerncolleagues, and of maintaining an internationalperspective in his research. In this brief note wewish merely to underline the unity of Luria’s workby showing some of its main theoretical and

Luria: brain and mind 817

methodological characteristics accentuated by recentmonographs and symposia.1

ANIMAL BRAIN VERSUS HUMAN BRAIN

First, Luria started from a clear distinctionbetween the brain organization of animals and thebrain organization of human beings. This view wastypical of the historical-cultural school founded byVygotsky with Luria and the other leading figure,Aleksey N. Leontiev (1903-1979). The main sourceof this difference was found in what these authorscalled “extracerebral connections”, that is thegeneration of new integrated brain systems due tothe influence of historical and cultural factors.Compared to the animal brain, the functions of whichdepend mainly on genetic factors, the human brainhas the property to organize new anatomo-functional

Fig. 1 – The child Aleksandr Romanovich (3 years about)with his mother Evgenia Viktorovna (Haskin) and father RomanAlbertovich Luria. Luria belonged to a Jewish middle-high socialclass living first in Kazan (where the psychologist was born in1902) and then from 1921 in Moscow (the mother was a dentistand the father was a well-known physician, interested inpsychosomatic disorders).

Fig. 2 – Sigmund Freud’s letter to Luria (July 3, 1922) withthe appreciation for the foundation of the PsychoanalyticalSociety in Kazan by the young Russian psychologist. Luria wasthen the secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytical Society inMoscow up to 1927.

1 For Luria’s biography see, first of all, his autobiography, slightly differentin English (1979) and Russian (1982) editions; the biography by hisdaughter Elena (Luria, 1994), and the monographs by Levitin (1998) andHomskaya (1992, 2001, English translation edited by DE Tupper). Acomplete bibliography of Luria’s works (and translations) is now given inLuria (2003, pp. 384-430). Figures are drawn from our book on the historyof psychology (Mecacci, in press), and the web site edited by MichaelCole: http://luria.ucsd.edu/ (except for the Figure 9, reproduced by courtesyof Anne-Lise Christensen).

organizations under the influence of the historicaland cultural context. The most typical example ofthese “functional systems” of the human brain is thatof writing, a cognitive ability that is present only andif the brain of specific human beings lived or live inan historical epoch and belonged or belong to aculture in which writing systems are available.Moreover there do not exist functional systems thatare fixed, immutable: one may think of the twowriting systems in Japanese with their complex brainorganization different from the organization ofWestern writing systems (Mecacci, 1984; Tsunoda,1985). The development of these new “higher”functional systems implies a reorganization of“lower” cortical functions, a kind of Gestalt-likerestructuration where inferior components acquire anew functional meaning at the moment in which theybecome part of the new superior organization.Damage to a lower component has not the samefunctional consequence when it functions as suchcompared to when it is an element of a new highersystem (this was the problem called by Luria the“analysis of syndrome”, with the differentiationamong symptoms depending on the higher or lowerlevels of integration of the damaged braincomponents; Luria, 1966/1980). Thus Luria’s

818 Luciano Mecacci

perspective stood out noticeably from the otherRussian theories (Bekhterev, Pavlov) on therelationship between brain and mind. In fact thesetheories stated a continuity between the animal brainand the human brain, with differences only ofquantitative order (the increasing complexity ofreflex activity) (Mecacci, 1979). On the contrary forVygotsky, Luria and Leontiev there was a straightqualitative difference. The idea of functional system,a network of localized brain centers, each one withspecific lower functions, interacting dynamically incomplex psychological activities, was developedfirst by Vygotsky (1934b/1965) and then by Leontiev(1959/1982). Luria widened this main concept byreferring to his own research on brain-injuredpatients, and under the influence of other Russianscientists: Nikolay A. Bernstein who criticized therigid Pavlovian approach and introduced a plasticconception of the brain planning of behavior, andPetr K. Anokhin who updated the Pavlovian theorywith new principles and results coming fromneurophysiology and cybernetics. Moreover Luriadeeply appreciated the innovative contribution to theknowledge of the brain organization underlying thepsychological processes, given by Western scientistsLeonardo Bianchi, Kurt Goldstein and Karl Pribram.

CHILD VERSUS ADULT MIND

The development of psychological processes inthe human species is influenced not only by thematuration of the nervous system, with the gradualappearance of new abilities and operations duringthe first years of life (as stated, for instance, byPiaget to quote a psychologist criticized by thehistorical-cultural school). In fact this psychologicaldevelopment requires a necessary condition: thechild has to learn the use of “cognitive tools” – or“cognitive artifacts”, referring to the currentterminology of Norman (1991) – that are absolutelyindispensable to his or her mental activities. Thusin a culture where a writing system is available, thechild has to learn the use of the relative tools (thestylus or the pen, the wax tablet or the paper, thescroll or the book) to be able to write and to read.

Fig. 3 – Luria in the late 1920s when he had already begun hisco-working with Lev S. Vygotsky at the Institute of Psychology inMoscow. It was the period of research on the cognitive developmentin children and on the cognition-emotion relationships, illustratedin two main books respectively (Studies on the History of Behavior:Ape, Primitive, and Child, 1930, co-author Vygotsky; and TheNature of Human Conflicts, 1932).

Fig. 4 – A group photo of psychologists working at theInstitute of Psychology, Moscow, in the late Twenties. Seated inthe front row: Luria and Vygotsky (second and third from left,respectively).

The same condition is necessary, for example, forthe development of musical abilities: it is notenough for a brain, such as the human one, to bepotentially able to produce a piece of music, themastery of the relative tools (such as a harp or apiano) is indispensable. Other examples might beadded up to the inclusion of the cognitivesignificance of the tools of the computer andInternet. The real substantial difference between theanimal brain and the human brain lies therefore inthe possibility of developing and using newinstruments which make the interaction betweenhumans and the environment more and morecomplex and flexible (Vygotsky and Luria, 1930).There do not exist complex cognitive processes,typical of the human species, which are not relatedto the mastering of tools (for this reason qualifiedas cognitive). The formation of new brainfunctional systems is thus linked to the presenceand mastering of cognitive tools. This issue wasstudied by the historical-cultural school during theontogenesis in systematic research on the child, andin cross-cultural projects started at the beginning ofthe ‘30s to verify how within the human speciesrelevant differences may emerge in the cognitiveperformance due to the fund of cognitive toolsavailable in a given cultural context (Luria, 1976).

Language was a recurrent topic for Luria’sresearch, in both child and adult, with normal or

Luria: brain and mind 819

impaired functioning. Vygotsky’s theory on thebasic role of language in the development ofpsychological processes was widened by Luriaunder the influence of the new trends in linguisticsand psycholinguistics. Luria especially appreciatedthe work by Roman Jakobson (with whom thefriendship dated from the Twenties) and NoamChomsky.

NORMAL VERSUS PATHOLOGICAL

Differently from other theories of that periodwhen Vygotsky’s and Luria’s views began to bedeveloped, for instance Piaget’s work founded onresearch made on well children belonging toprivileged social classes, the activity of Russianpsychologists was first addressed to disabled andsocially disadvantaged children. GraduallyVygotsky (1934a, 1934b/1965) began to beinterested in the cognitive disturbances of brain-injured patients and schizophrenic patients, whileLuria was to concentrate his work on thepsychological effects of brain lesions since theearly Forties (arriving to publish the firstmonograph on this topic in 1947, TraumaticAphasia; the first Luria’s neuropsychologicalwriting in English had appeared in 1944, but onlyafter the article published in the first issue of

Fig. 5 – Scoring-sheet from the Psychological Expedition to Central Asia, directed by Luria. Among the members of the expeditionthere was the Gestalt-school member Kurt Koffka who filled in the scoring-sheet. Here Koffka (K.K.) and Luria appear as “control”subjects in a comparison with native Uzbeks to verify whether these illiterate subjects experienced the same optical-geometrical illusions.

Language and Speech in 1958 and the translationof the above-mentioned book in 1959 Luriabecame known in Western countries for his workon the effects of brain injuries). This perspectiveled the Russian school to consider the pathologicalnot as an exception to the rule of the normal or as

820 Luciano Mecacci

a deficit, something lacking in the normal person.The investigation of the mental activity of a blind-deaf-dumb child, a mentally retarded child, a brain-injured adult or a psychiatric patient was relevantby itself as the evidence of a special brainfunctional organization (for example, in the casesof serious anomalies at birth) or reorganization (forexample, in the cases of lesions in the adult age),in other words one of the many possibilities of thehuman brain to programme and re-programmeitself. The normal and the pathological were notconsidered two poles, one positive and the othernegative, but two qualitatively different dimensionsthrough which the interaction between a humanbeing and the environment is developed. If thenormal becomes a normative parameter, that iswhat has to be followed or adopted by anindividual in a given historical and cultural context(for example, to be able to read and to write in aWestern industrialized country), this depends on thedemands of that particular context. In other words,alexia may be considered a “pathological”condition only in that context where reading isconsidered a “normal” ability of every individual.

THEORY VERSUS REHABILITATION

This last remark on the culturally relativemeaning of the pathological dimension has animportant consequence for the concept ofrehabilitation in Luria (since his first work thatappeared in 1948 and was translated in 1963).Rehabilitation is a process of recovery that has totake into account not only the necessities for thedaily life of the brain-injured person to make useof damaged functions and mental capacities, butalso the specific meaning these damaged abilities

Fig. 6 – Luria, left, and Karl Pribram in the Sixties. The twoscientists enjoyed a close friendship and co-worked in a researchproject on the function of frontal lobes.

Fig. 7 – Luria, right, with L.S. Zasetsky, the hero of the bookA Lost and Regained World: History of a Brain Wound (1971),known in the English version with the title The Man with aShattered World.

Fig. 8 – Luria examining a patient at the Laboratory ofNeuropsychology, Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery, Moscow,1974.

had in the everyday life of that brain-injuredperson. If a lesion in a specific area of the cerebralcortex damages the operations of listening to themusical language, this fact has a very seriousconsequence for the personal life and theprofession of a musician, while the effects may bevery small for a person interested in music only asan amateur listener. It is from here that arises theparticular attention given by Luria to thesignificance acquired from a brain lesion for thewhole life, cognitive, emotional and professional ofthe damaged person. Indeed Luria’s clinical casesare complete “histories” of that specific person,what they were in the past, what they are in thepresent, and what they might be in the future (asfor the most famous case: Luria, 1972). Of coursethis perspective recalls Freud’s approach in hisclinical cases, where the therapy and therehabilitation are the means of access to the wholepsychological life of the individual undertreatment. As Freud said introducing the concept ofpsychoanalysis, a theory of mind is at the sametime a framework for the therapy, and the therapyis a concrete validation of the theory itself.

CLINICAL VERSUS EXPERIMENTAL

It was inevitable, for the reasons mentionedabove, that Luria would prefer clinical investigation,

Luria: brain and mind 821

the extensive study of a single case of brain injury,to experimental investigation on groups of patients.

Fig. 9 – Luria’s notes in his own handwriting for the testing of a patient with the resection of left prefrontal region (the patient wasexamined in the presence of Anne-Lise Christensen, the 10th September 1975).

Fig. 10 – One of the last photos of Luria in the Seventies.

822 Luciano Mecacci

Even within the clinical setting, with the patient infront of him, Luria wished to maintain a flexibleinvestigation strategy, on one hand changing it asfunction of the particular cultural and professionalprofile of the patient, and on the other refusing therigid use of a test battery. Luria gave, of course,some guidelines and indicated which tests to use(see, e.g., Luria, 1966/1980, 1999) and acceptedwith favour the first attempt on the part ofChristensen (1974) to systematize his clinicalapproach, but always in the perspective of thegreatest flexibility (a characteristic of Luria’sapproach that was emphasised by his pupils andfollowers after the diffusion of the Luria-NebraskaNeuropsychological Battery; see Akhutina andTsvetkova, 1983; Glozman, 1999). In one of his lastpapers Luria even went so far as to contrast Sovietneuropsychology with that of America on the basisof their adoption of the clinical or the experimentalapproach (Luria and Majovski, 1977). However, thisperspective did not mean that Luria rejected whollythe experimental investigation, for example thefactorial-model comparison between patients withdifferent brain injuries, but the necessity forthorough investigation of a single person, that manor that woman, with a specific culture, a specificprofession, a specific family and social contextremained fundamental: according to Luria only thistype of research would enable a project ofrehabilitation to be set up, made to measure for thatperson, to allow them to regain their lost world.

REFERENCES

AKHUTINA TV and TSVETKOVA LS. Comments on a standardisedversion of Luria’s test. Brain and Cognition, 2: 129-134, 1983.

CHRISTENSEN A-L. Luria’s Neuropsychological Investigations.Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1974.

GLOZMAN J. Quantitative and qualitative integration of Luriaprocedures. Neuropsychology Review, 9: 23-32, 1999.

HOMSKAYA ED. Alexander Romanovich Luria: A ScientificBiography. New York-Boston-Dordrecht-London-Moscow:Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001 (Russian ed., 1992).

LEONTEV AN. Problems in the Development of the Mind. Moscow:Progress Publishers, 1982 (Russian ed., 1959).

LEVITIN K. A dissolving pattern: Reflections on the life and workof A.R. Luria. Journal of Russian and East EuropeanPsychology, 36 (whole issues n. 5 and 6), 1998.

LURIA AR. The Nature of Human Conflicts, or Emotion, Conflictand Will. New York: Liveright, 1932.

LURIA AR. Rehabilitation of the nervous system in war trauma.American Review of Soviet Medicine, 2: 44-52, 1944.

LURIA AR. Brain disorders and language analysis. Language andSpeech, 1: 14-34, 1958.

LURIA AR. Traumatic Aphasia. The Hague: Mouton, 1959(Russian ed., 1947).

LURIA AR. Restoration of Function after Brain Injury. New York:Macmillan/Pergamon, 1963 (Russian ed., 1948).

LURIA AR. Higher Cortical Functions in Man. New York: BasicBooks, 1966. Rev. ed. 1980 (Russian ed., 1962, rev. 1969).

LURIA AR. The Man with a Shattered World. New York, BasicBooks, 1972 (Russian ed., 1971).

LURIA AR. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and SocialFoundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Books,1976 (Russian ed., 1974).

LURIA AR. The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of SovietPsychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977(Russian ed., 1982).

LURIA AR. Outline for the neuropsychological examination ofpatients with local brain lesions. Neuropsychology Review, 9:9-22, 1999.

LURIA AR. Psychological Heritage: Selected Writings on GeneralPsychology. Moscow: Smysl, 2003 (in Russian).

LURIA AR and MAJOVSKI LV. Basic approaches used in Americanand Soviet clinical neuropsychology. American Psychologist,32: 959-968, 1977.

LURIA AR and VYGOTSKY LS Studies on the History of Behavior:Ape, Primitive, and Child. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1993 (Russianed., 1930)

LURIA EA. My Father Aleksandr Luria. Moscow: Gnozis, 1992 (inRussian).

MECACCI L. Brain and History: The Relationship betweenNeurophysiology and Psychology in Soviet Research (prefaceby A.R. Luria). New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1979.

MECACCI L. Looking for the social and cultural dimension of thehuman brain. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 1:293-299, 1984.

MECACCI L. Storia Antologica della Psicologia. Firenze: Giunti, inpress.

NORMAN DA. Cognitive artifacts. In Carroll JM (Ed), DesigningInterface: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface.Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

TSUNODA T. The Japanese Brain: Uniqueness and Universality.Tokio: Taishukan, 1985.

VAN DER VEER R and VALSINER J. Understanding Vygotsky: AQuest for Synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

VYGOTSKY LS. Thought in schizophrenia. Archives of Neurologyand Psychiatry, 31: 1063-1077, 1934a.

VYGOTSKY LS. Psychology and localization of functions.Neuropsychologia, 3: 381-386, 1965 (Russian ed., 1934b).

VYGOTSKY LS and LURIA AR. Tool and symbol in childdevelopment. In Van der Veer R and Valsiner J (Eds), TheVygotsky reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994 (Russian ed.,1930).

Luciano Mecacci, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, via S.Niccolò 93 - 50125 Firenze, Italy. e-mail: meca@psico.unifi.it

(Received 10 November 2003; accepted 12 November 2003)