the man who mistook his wife for a hat summary

It was presumed, usually contemptuously, to be more primitive than the left, the latter being seen as the unique flower of human evolution. Anatomically, too, the right hemisphere is less differentiated than the left: it does not have hundreds of clearly-demarcated regions like the left, but instead has a relatively homogeneous appearance. One important reason for the neglect of the right hemisphere, the ‘minor’ hemisphere, as it has always been called, is that while it is easy to demonstrate the effects of variously-located lesions on the left side, the corresponding syndromes of the right hemisphere are much less distinct. Indeed, the entire history of neurology and neuropsychology can be seen as a history of the investigation of the left hemisphere. Higher Cortical Functions in Man treated only those functions which appertained to the left hemisphere of the brain similarly, Zazetsky, the man with the shattered world, had a huge lesion in the left hemisphere – the right was intact. Although these books were almost perfect in their way, there was a whole realm which Luria had not touched. It was set out, systematically, in a monumental book, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (translated into English in 1966), and, in a wholly different way, in a biography or ‘pathography’ – The Man with a Shattered World (which appeared in English in 1973).

Luria, and considering its revolutionary importance, was somewhat slow in reaching the West. The development of this immensely fruitful science was the life-work of A.R. Luria), Leontev, Anokhin, Bernstein and others, and was called by them ‘neuropsychology’. The new science of brain/mind which Freud envisaged came into being in the Second World War, in Russia, as the joint creation of A.R.

An adequate understanding of aphasia or agnosia would, he believed, require a new, more sophisticated science. He felt this, especially, in regard to certain disorders of recognition and perception, for which he coined the term ‘agnosia’. Towards the end of the century it became evident to more acute observers – above all, Freud, in his book on Aphasia (1891) – that this sort of mapping was too simplistic, that all mental performances had an intricate internal structure, and must have an equally complex physiological basis. This opened the way to a cerebral neurology, which made it possible, over the decades, to ‘map’ the human brain, ascribing specific powers to equally specific ‘centres’ in the brain. The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech (aphasia) consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat summary