The Man with a Shattered World

The History of a Brain Wound

A. R. Luria, Lynn Solotaroff

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1987
• Print ISBN: 9780674546257
• eBook ISBN: 9780674255579
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health
• Index: Psychology

Russian psychologist A. R. Luria presents a compelling portrait of a man's heroic struggle to regain his mental faculties. A soldier named Zasetsky, wounded in the head at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, suddenly found himself in a frightening world: he could recall his childhood but not his recent past; half his field of vision had been destroyed; he had great difficulty speaking, reading, and writing.

Much of the book consists of excerpts from Zasetsky's own diaries. Laboriously, he records his memories in order to reestablish his past and to affirm his existence as an intelligent being. Luria's comments and interpolations provide a valuable distillation of the theory and techniques that guided all of his research. His "digressions" are excellent brief introductions to the topic of brain structure and its relation to higher mental functions.

Index

agnosia, optical, 29

amnesia, Zasetsky’s, see “speech-memory”

aphasia: intellectual, 137, 138; Zasetsky’s, 86, 137, 138

arithmetic, Zasetsky’s loss of knowledge of, 145–149

body, Zasetsky’s sense of, 41–45

brain, v, viii, xiii, 22–35; auditory-vestibular (temporal) section of, 30; blocks of the, 24–26, 30, 33–35; cortex of, see cortex; and equipotentiality principle, xiii; hemispheres of, 22, 26, 32, 33; injury to, 28, 31, 33, 34, 112, 113, 131; and localization-of-function principle, xii; maps of, xii, 23; subcortical nuclei of, 23; tactile-motor (parietal) section of, 30; tumor of, ix; visual (occipital) section of, 30

brain stem, 24

Broca, Paul, 32

case endings, in grammatical constructions, 125–126

checkers, played by Zasetsky, 152

chess, played by Zasetsky, 150–152

cognition: factors affecting, 29, 30; and language, 32–33

comprehension, 123

cortex, x, xii, 22, 23, 25, 30, 140; in “damped” condition, 113, 114; injury to, 28, 31, 33, 113, 128; and “law of strength,” 113; primary visual, 26, 27, 28; secondary visual, 27, 28, 31; stellate cells of, 27, 28; tertiary sectors of, 30–31, 32, 33

“damped” cortical condition (Pavlov), 113, 114

disembodied idea, Zasetsky’s, 115–122 passim

dominoes, played by Zasetsky, 152–153

electric shock, 27

empathy, Zasetsky’s capacity for, 155

energizing block of brain, 24–26

extended sentence structure, 123, 124

fantasy, Zasetsky’s capacity for, 155

games, played by Zasetsky, 150–153

geometry, Zasetsky’s loss of knowledge of, 142–144

Goldstein, K., 23

grammatical constructions, 122–139 passim; see also language; linguistic analysis; words

gray matter, 23, 24

Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 109

hemianopsia, 28

ideas, disembodied: Zasetsky’s, 115–122 passim

“I’ll Fight On” (Zasetsky), 76

images, undeciphered: Zasetsky’s, 115–122 passim

imagination, Zasetsky’s capacity for, 155

inversion, grammatical, 124, 125

Kimovsk, Zasetsky in, 58–59, 92, 97, 104, 157

“kinetic melodies,” 72

Kisegach, Zasetsky in, 97

language, 123; and cognition, 32–33; see also grammatical constructions; linguistic analysis;...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Oliver Sacks
• Concerning the Book and Its Author
• From the Author
• The Past
• War
• After Being Wounded
• The Rehabilitation Hospital
• Our First Meeting
• Excerpt from Case History No. 3712
• A Brief Summary of Brain Anatomy
• First Steps in a Shattered World
• His Vision
• His Body
• Space
• Reading
• A Student Again
• Writing, the Turning Point
• “The Story of a Terrible Brain Injury”
• Why Did He Write?
• “My World Has No Memories”
• “My Memories Came Back from the Wrong End"
• The Peculiar Features of His “Speech-Memory”
• On Recollecting Words
• Restricted to Undeciphered Images, Disembodied Ideas
• Grammatical Constructions
• “All My Knowledge Is Gone”
• A Story That Has No Ending
• “Were It Not for War . . .”
• Index