ABSTRACT
Alexander Romanovich Luria was content to play second fiddle to Vygotsky, even after the latter’s untimely death in 1934. Luria had neither his friend’s charisma, nor, frankly, his flights of imagination. He once claimed, ‘I divide my career into two periods: the small and insignificant period before my meeting with Vygotsky and the more important and essential one after the meeting’. Luria’s dialectical method of integrating the specific and general was formulated in opposition to the localisation/modular view of the brain. Although some basic sensory motor functions may be favoured by certain parts of the brain, higher cortical processes are too complex to be confined to any one region of the brain. As such, his theoretical concepts can an explanatory framework for a modern neuroimaging discipline that is often too atheoretical and data-driven. In other words, for Luria, ‘higher-order neurocognitive functional systems were formed by the brain’s engagement of culturally organized activity in the real world’.
