Prologue

In an obituary of his mentor, Frank Beach described the life and career of Karl Spencer Lashley as the embodiment of many contradictions. Lashley, Beach wrote, was a “[f]amous theorist who specialized in disproving theories, especially his own,” and an “[i]nspiring teacher who described all teaching as useless.” Perhaps the most astonishing of these ironies is that Lashley was an “[e]minent psychologist with no earned degree in psychology.” Indeed, Lashley received formal training neither in neurology nor in psychology, the sciences which became the foci of his mature work. Lashley himself noted:

For Beach and the historians who have followed him, the problem has been to understand adequately how Lashley became renowned in fields for which he had little preparation. Most recently, in fact, Darryl Bruce has argued that Lashley's “shift” from his undergraduate work to his mature research occurred in several distinct steps, from bacteriology, to zoology and genetics, to comparative psychology, to learning, and finally to the neural basis of learning.