Alexander Luria

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“Now Virtually All Formal Schooling…Means That You Take Hypotheses Seriously”

March 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

IQ continues to increase globally (if unevenly), and it’s not only in developing nations playing catch-up (China, for a huge example) but also in long-developed ones (the U.S., that other ginormous example). Why is that? Better tools and an improved understanding of tests? Perhaps, but the man who gave the Flynn effect its name believes abstract thinking is at the heart of the steady incline. Does that mean, as I’ve always suspected, that video games are good for us? From William Kremer at the BBC:

James Flynn believes test wiseness may have been a factor in IQ gains in the US in the first half of the 20th Century. However, since then the amount of IQ testing taking place has waned – and IQ increases have remained steady.

Flynn puts this continued progress down to profound shifts in society as well as education over the last century, which have led people to think in a more abstract, scientific way – the kind of intelligence measured by IQ tests.

He cites the work of Russian neuroscientist Alexander Luria, who studied indigenous people in the Soviet Union. “He found that they were very pragmatic and concrete in their thinking,” says Flynn, “and they weren’t capable of using logical abstractions or taking hypotheticals seriously.” Luria put the following problem to the head man of one tribe in Siberia: Where there’s always snow, the bears are white; there’s always snow at the North Pole – what colour are the bears there?

The head man replied that he had never seen bears that were any colour other than brown, but if a wise or truthful man came from the North Pole and told him that bears there were white, he might believe him. The scientific methods of hypothesising, classifying and making logical deductions were alien to him.

“Now virtually all formal schooling, when you get past the sixth grade into high school and college, means that you take hypotheses seriously,” says Flynn. “This is what science is all about. And you’re using logic on abstract categories.”

And this kind of thinking doesn’t only occur in school.•

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“He Ultimately Couldn’t Make A Living As Anything Other Than A Stage Performer — A Memory Freak”

October 23, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve just cracked open The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a book I’ve always wanted to read and just never got around to. Another book that falls into that category of neglected reading matter: Neuropsychologist A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Luria was the forerunner to Oliver Sacks and other scientist’s sharing unusual case studies of the mind. The book, as you might gather from the title, is a portrait of a man with an incredibly elastic memory. In an excellent Five Books interview at the Browser, Joshua Foer discusses this work. An excerpt:

“Question:

Finally, let’s turn to The Mind of a Mnemonist, a monograph by a renowned Russian neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria. He subtitles it ‘a little book about a vast memory.’ Tell us about Luria’s subject.

Joshua Foer:

This book created the entire genre of humanistic clinical histories. Without Luria, there could be no Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist who wrote Awakenings. For 30 years, Luria studied a journalist called Solomon Shereshevsky or simply ‘S’. Supposedly, S had a vacuum cleaner memory. He could remember anything.

Luria is a terrific writer, but he didn’t document S’s skills with the kind of detail that is required to compare S with people who live today. Luria is so concerned with telling a good story that he doesn’t rigorously describe S’s abilities. We don’t have any other records of S, this seemingly singular character in the history of psychology. As a result it’s hard to draw too many conclusions from this book.

Question:

What does Luria’s study of S teach us about the human condition?

Joshua Foer:

S seemed to remember too well. He was ineffectual as a journalist and ultimately couldn’t make a living as anything other than a stage performer — a memory freak. I think that points to something profound. Forgetting is an important part of learning, it teaches us to abstract. Because S remembered too much, he couldn’t process what he witnessed, and as a result he couldn’t make his way in the world.”

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“My Memory Flows Like A Movie—Nonstop And Uncontrollable”

May 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “Remember This,” Joshua Foer’s excellent 2007 National Geographic piece about people with extreme memories and those of us with more average neural connections governing the data and images we retain:

“There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as ‘AJ,’ who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called ‘EP,’ who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

‘My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable,’ says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She’s not easily stumped.

There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). ‘S,’ a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he’d first heard them. But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.

EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He’s personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP’s memory.”

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Oliver Sacks discussing his pen pal Alexander Luria, the neuropsychologist who authored The Mind of a Mnemonist:

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