Before earning his medical degree in 1937, the renowned neuropsychologist Alexander Luria (1902–1977) undertook a research expedition in 1931 to the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan in central Asia. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing acceleration of social change, this region of rural villages and nomad camps rapidly transformed from feudalism to a 20th-century planned economy. Luria believed that the material conditions of culture shape cognitive structures. Thus, his hypothesis was that the rapid and broad reshaping of culture through collectivisation would demonstrate that modernisation changed traditional ways of thinking.

To prove the sociohistorical nature of mental processes, Luria used scenarios to test logical classification. Only, when he presented his subjects with a major and minor premise, things did not go precisely as planned. Here’s an example:

‘In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white.

Novia Zemlya is in the far north.

What colour are the bears in Novia Zemlya?’

Subjects, instead of constructing logical links between the premises, referred mainly to their personal experience. Most respondents replied that, since they had never been to Novia Zemlya, they were unable to say. Luria’s protests that he had just told them all the bears were white were met with scepticism: ‘How do we know if you’re not lying?’ Or: ‘There are different kinds of bears. If one is born red, he will stay that way.’

Uzbek nomads belied the modern assumption that language and knowledge exist apart from immediate experience. Their holistic, as opposed to analytic, perspective revealed them to be more interested in context than the actual traits of objects, and more attuned to flux than the constant features of isolated entities as revealed by explicit rules of formal reasoning.

Luria concluded, given evidence that processes of abstraction and generalisation were not invariable at different stages of cultural and economic progress, that the processes themselves are products of the total sociocultural environment. He would make one more expedition in 1932 before Stalinist critics declared the research colonialist and racist. His research into the sociohistorical nature of mental process ceased that year, and his results would not be published for over 40 years.

There may be takeaways for psychiatry here given that dominance of the medical model is not complete. General agreement that mental disorders do not result solely from pathological brain processes means that no single level of explanation suffices to explain symptoms. Psychiatry attends to neurological, genetic, developmental and social phenomena in order to explain and address symptoms. In an interesting way, scepticism towards the biomedical paradigm aligns with the scepticism of the Uzbek nomads towards syllogistic logic. Both draw upon the embodied nature of thought patterns and their environmental context. And both reflect current approaches inspired by the 4E movement in philosophy of mind, that is, the ‘embedded, embodied, extended and enactive’ perspective. 4E gives us views of human nature that, like the pioneering work of Luria, stress the interdependence of person and environment and emphasises the dynamic aspects of knowledge.