This important book, by the most distinguished Soviet psychologist of our time, is the product of almost forty years of extensive research aimed at understanding the cerebral basis of human psychological activity. The main part of the book describes what we know today about the individual systems that make up the human brain and about the role of the individual zones of the cerebral hemispheres in the task of providing the necessary conditions for higher forms of mental activity to take place. Finally, Luria analyzes the cerebral organization of perception and action, of attention and memory, or speech and intellectual processes, and attempts to fit the facts obtained by neuropsychological studies of individual brain systems into their appropriate place in the grand design of psychological science.
* Editorial Foreword Functional organization and mental activity * Local brain lesions and localization of functions * The three principal functional units Local brain systems and their functional analysis * The occipital regions and the organization of visual perception * The temporal regions and organization of auditory perception * The parietal regions and the organization of simultaneous syntheses * Sensorimotor and premotor zones and the organization of movement * The frontal lobes and the regulation of mental activity Synthetic mental activities and their Cerebral Organization * Perception * Movement and action * Attention * Memory * Speech * Thinking Conclusion
