Alexander Luria

Because if we are studying conversations, then the basic unit of analysis should be a conversation.

So there's this Russian physicist, Luria.

I want to say Alexander Luria, but it may not be the right first name.

They talk about this idea of, for our researchers, often they want to analyze stuff.

Number nine, mind of a mnemonist over matter of a mnemonist.

Now that we know that Oliver Sacks sometimes just made things up, link to that story there, it's time to return to Sacks' own idol, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria.

I had heard of Luria's classic book, The Mind of a Mnemonist, a case study of a man with a spectacular memory.

But I had not heard that the subject in question could also perform feats like shrinking his pupils on command, numbing his pain by imagining it happening to someone else, or making his hands warmer or colder just by thinking warm or cold thoughts.

Before we get into today's conversation, we thought it would be useful to give brief overviews of three people who Tony references in the discussion.

These are Roger Sperry, Alexander Luria, and Ivan Pavlov.

Starting with Roger Sperry, he was an American Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychologist and neuroscientist best known for his work with split-brain patients.

Sperry studied people whose corpus callosum, the major bundle of fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, had been surgically severed, usually as a treatment for severe epilepsy.

His research showed that the two hemispheres could actually operate somewhat independently and that they had different strengths and specializations.

His work really helped popularize the idea of hemispheric specialization, including the association between the left hemisphere and language, as well as the right hemisphere and some nonverbal abilities.

Next, there is Alexander Luria, a Russian neuropsychologist who's arguably one of the most important figures in the development of modern clinical neuropsychology.

Luria was heavily influenced by the work of Vygotsky and took a very different approach from simply trying to map individual mental abilities onto specific brain regions.

It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction.

Luria met his subjects at tea houses, in field camps, and around evening fires.

There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought.