Lashley, Karl Spencer

(b Davis, West Virginia, 7 June 1890; d. Poitiers, France 7 August 1958),

psychology, neurophysiology.

Karl Lashley’s ancestry was English, primarily middle class. His father, Charles Gilpin Lashley, was a merchant in Davis, West Virginia, and its mayor and postmaster for many years. Lashley contended that he had received his native endowment from his mother, Maggie Blanche Spencer, a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. She exerted a profound influence upon her only child, encouraging his intellectual pursuits with her own library of 2,000 volumes. As a boy Karl collected various animal and plant specimens on long walks in the country. Throughout his life he formed assorted collections and kept unusual pets.

After receiving his B.A. from West Virginia University in 1910 he was awarded a teaching fellowship in biology at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. in 1914 from Johns Hopkins University under Jennings and Mast. In 1917 Lashley was instructor of psychology at the University of Minnesota; by 1923 he had been promoted to full professor. He remained at Minnesota until 1926, when he joined the staff at the University of Chicago as research psychologist; and he became professor of psychology in 1929. From 1935 to 1955 he was research professor of neuropsychology at Harvard University and, from 1942, director of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology.

In 1918 Lashley married Edith Ann Baker, an accomplished musician who died in 1948. A son born in 1919 died shortly thereafter. In 1957 he married Claire Imredy Schiller, widow of the Hungarian psychologist Paul Schiller.

Lashley was one of the world’s foremost physiological psychologists. His scientific activities may be divided into four distinct periods. In the first (1912-1918) he laid a firm foundation in animal behavior working with lower forms, including their genetic make-up. In the second (1919-1929) his most noted contributions related to his penetrating analysis of the rat brain, in particular cerebral localization and interneuronal connections. His ideas of the learning process emerged from this analysis, culminating in Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence (New York, 1964). His theory of the equipotentiality of the cortex attracted world-wide attention and his article “In Search of the Engram” (The Neuropsychology of Lashley, pp. 478-505) made him famous. In the third period (1930-1942) he concerned himself primarily with vision, the chief sensory modality in learning. Few other scientific endeavors have equaled this thorough study of vision in relation to learning. In the final period (1941-1958) Lashley was a theorizer, especially on learning. He was also the world’s sharpest critic of other theories, and especially of his own. He wrote: “My bricks won’t hang together without speculative straw that I know is hooey.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See Frank A. Beach’s memoir of Karl Lashley in Bio-graphical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 35 (1961), 163-196. A full and complete bibliography of Lashley’s works follows on pp. 196-204. The Neuro-psychology of Lashle, F. A. Beach, D. O. Hebb, C. T. Morgan, and H. W. Nissen, eds. (New York, 1960), is a collection of Lashley’s major publications.

Paul G. Roofe