The Working Brain (El cerebro en acción): Alexander Luria’s Introduction to Neuropsychology
Our brain is unique, which is why so many researchers have devoted their lives to studying it in depth and comparing patients with different conditions. The reviewer read it in its two-volume Spanish edition, El cerebro en acción; in English it is Alexander Luria’s classic The Working Brain.
Author: Alexander Romanovich Luria (1902–1977), Soviet neuropsychologist
Title: The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology (English edition 1973; Spanish: El cerebro en acción, 2 vols.)
Format: English paperback (Basic Books), 399 pages
Scope: Neuropsychology
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/046509208X (ASIN 046509208X)
Mapping the Brain (Volume I)
Distinguishing the regions of the brain, and what each one does, is already an advance. Depending on whether a lesion is in the right or left hemisphere, patients face different difficulties. Writing and drawing are how the people in these studies express themselves, and it is clear that those with a significant lesion struggle to sketch even the simplest objects. Problems such as aphasia are easy to identify, as are difficulties with memory, spatial vision and more. The results from different cases can be compared, leading to surprising conclusions.
Why It Matters for Medicine
The main diseases of the nervous system that can lead to more serious disorders are due to lesions in particular areas. That is why doctors study the various regions: to make diagnosis ever more specific and precise. Complex as it is, the brain is a fascinating organ.
Functional Systems (Volume II)
The second part explains the brain’s complex systems and how groups of regions work together to perform a given function. Studying patients with a specific condition helps reveal what they have in common, but human psychological processes are very complex. Brain organisation is essential to explain perception, movement, attention, memory, language and intellect; each can be described by dividing the brain into functional groups or zones. Abstraction, logical thought, rational behaviour and sensation are harder to place, and opinions have differed throughout history.
Alexander Luria
Alexander Romanovich Luria (1902–1977) began his career in Moscow in the 1920s, working closely with the psychologist Lev Vygotsky. During the Second World War he treated thousands of soldiers with head wounds, and that experience became the basis of his life’s work: understanding how damage to particular parts of the brain affects language, memory, perception and action, and how patients might be helped to recover. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern neuropsychology.
Three Functional Units
The book’s best-known idea is that the brain works as three interacting functional units: one that regulates arousal and wakefulness, centred in the brainstem and deep structures; one that receives, analyses and stores information from the senses, in the rear parts of the cortex; and one that plans, programmes and checks our actions, in the frontal lobes. Complex abilities such as speaking or writing depend on all three working together, which is why damage in very different places can disrupt the same skill in different ways.
The model is still taught today.
It remains hugely influential.
Neuropsychology courses still cite it.
Romantic Science
Luria also wrote two remarkable case studies for general readers: The Mind of a Mnemonist, about a man with an apparently limitless memory, and The Man with a Shattered World, about a soldier struggling to rebuild his life after a brain injury. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, who admired him enormously, saw in these books a model of what Luria called "romantic science", combining rigorous analysis with deep attention to the individual person.
Why Read It
Luria was one of the founders of neuropsychology, and this book remains a landmark introduction to the field, still read by students half a century later.
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