Foreword to the 1987 Edition Foreword to the First Edition Preface 1. Introduction 2. The Beginning of the Research 3. His Memory The Initial Facts Synesthesia Words and Images Difficulties Eidotechnique The Art Of Forgetting 4. His World People and Things Words 5. His Mind His Strong Points His Weak Points 6. His Control of Behavior The Objective Data A Pew Words About Magic 7. His Personality
A. R. Luria was Professor of Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Jerome Bruner was University Professor at New York University.
A distinguished Soviet psychologist’s study…[of a] young man who
was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually
became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over
the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning
sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything
only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar
crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped
intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and
because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an
image for him. It is all fascinating and delightful.
*New Yorker*
Luria’s essay is a model of lucid presentation and is an altogether
convincing description of a man whose whole personality and fate
was conditioned by an intellectual idiosyncrasy.
*Times Literary Supplement*
These two books [The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a
Mnemonist] are compassionate and vivid portraits—he called them
‘neurological novels’—though they are in fact case histories of two
patients whom Luria observed for 30 years.
*Los Angeles Times*
A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria’s
famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the
classic paradigm of what Luria called ‘romantic science,’ a genre
characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of
operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in
some detail the subject’s extraordinary capacity for recall and
demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic
memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the
book deals with the subject’s construction of the world, his mental
strengths and weaknesses, his control of behaviour and his
personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as
to science.
*Psychological Medicine*
The richness of clinical insight, the acuity of the observations,
and the fullness of the overall picture of [Luria’s] mnemonist are
all extraordinary… A perceptive study not only of memory
organization but also of the manner in which memory is imbedded in
a pattern of life.
*Jerome S. Bruner, from the Foreword to the First Edition
(1967)*
Originally published almost two decades ago, these fascinating and
enormously informative case histories are now classics, each the
product of almost 30 years of research by the late Soviet
neuropsychologist Aleksandr Romanovich Luria… The Man with a
Shattered World describes the heroic struggle of a young soldier
trying to recover the memory and other mental capacities lost when
a bullet entered his brain. Although different facets of mind are
discussed in each [The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a
Mnemonist], in a sense the two books are complementary, as memory
is exaggerated in one and impaired in the other. What we know about
the brain and mind is greatly enriched by either book.
*Boston Globe*
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