Oliver Zangwill
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Oliver Zangwill
(1913–87). A principal founder of neurospsychology and professor of experimental psychology in the University of Cambridge from 1952 to retirement. Zangwill might be described as the Disraeli of psychology. Being literary and politically effective, he came from a similarly distinguished, unusually interesting family. His father was the influential novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), whose writings include Children of the Ghetto and The Master. A cousin was the artist and writer Michael Ayrton (1920–73), whose bronzes and paintings are powerful statements. A common grandfather was the physicist William Edward Ayrton FRS (1847–1908), remembered especially for his galvanometer, and for introducing electricity to Japan. He explained the curious Japanese and Chinese 'Magic Mirrors' which although appearing perfectly flat project sunlight in the form of a ghostly Buddha on to a distant wall.
Zangwill was born in East Preston in Sussex, the youngest of three. His first recorded experiment was undertaken at the age of 8, at the expense of a lady who claimed to know infallibly when rats were present. Zangwill hid a rat under his collar, and kissed her, but she did not detect that anything was amiss. Could this be the origin of his lifelong sadness at the inconclusiveness of so many psychological experiments?
Zangwill told the writer that the most creative period of his life was at Edinburgh, during the Second World War, assessing brain damage in the Brain Injuries Unit. Records are scarce, but we may quote from his paper 'In defence of clinical psychology' (1966):
My own duties consisted mainly in the study and assessment of psychological defects after injuries to the brain. These were of all kinds and all degrees of severity. At the psychological level, brain injury may be expressed either in intellectual or personality changes of a general kind or in the form of relatively specific defects of a more or less circumscribed nature. Among that latter are defects in various aspects of perception and motor skill, in memory and learning capacity, and in the sphere of language — the aphasias and kindred disorders of speech. It was my job to assess these changes as accurately as I could, where possible by methods somewhat more sophisticated than those of ordinary neurological examination. ... It will be borne in mind that many of our patients were young Service men and women who could look forward to many years of active life ahead of them.
Later (Zangwill, 1966), assessing the value of this work, Zangwill concludes that they were able to define disabilities, which though mild had importance for resettlement, and began to develop methods of re-education. He believed, justly, that it marked 'the beginning of scientific interest in the re-education of the brain-injured in this country'. Perhaps as significant was the opportunity for research into implication of brain injury for general psychology, with questions such as: is intelligence unitary or composite? Do defects of language imply defect of intelligence? Are intellectual powers discretely localized in the brain? What is the significance of cerebral dominance for psychological activity? Problems of localizing brain function continued to fascinate Zangwill for the rest of his life. He thought that adequate theoretical models of brain function, related to psychology, were needed for classifying psychological problems for diagnosis and therapy. He believed that experimental psychology had an important role to play for clinical advances but was dissatisfied with the current state of understanding, This was an excellent starting point. Zangwill formulated three principles for rehabilitation following brain damage, set out in 'Psychological aspects of rehabilitation in cases of brain damage' (1947): Compensation — reorganization of psychological function; Substitution — building up a new method of response to replace one damaged irreparably. The final principle — Direct training — involves complex and not well-understood issues of how far damaged regions can be taken over by other brain regions, with or without special training. Here animal experiments are important though they do not always correspond to humans. Zangwill's three principles remain the basis of current clinical approaches to rehabilitation. After the Second World War, Zangwill became assistant director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology (as it was then known) at Oxford, working with its first professor, the Canadian psychologist George Humphrey.
He succeeded Sir Frederic Bartlett as professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge in 1952. He developed important links with physiology and zoology, especially with the subdepartment of animal behaviour at Madingley, through Bill Thorpe and later Robert Hinde. He continued his Edinburgh-inspired work on brain injury at the National Institute of Neurology at Queen Square in London, working especially with George Ettlinger, Michael Humphrey, Clifford Jackson, John McFie, Malcolm Piercy, Moyra Williams, Maria Wyke, Brenda Milner, and Elizabeth Warrington.
His own interests were many. One was handedness (he wrote Cerebral Dominance and its Relation to Psychological Function, 1960), and he wrote significant papers on aphasia, cerebral dominance and right-/left-handedness, amnesia, dyslexia, Korsakoff's psychosis, and more. His short book An Introduction to Modern Psychology (1950) was widely read.
With the zoologist William Thorpe FRS, Zangwill ran a remarkably successful discussion group from 1953 to 1958, which linked ethologists, physiologists, and psychologists, producing the book Current Problems of Animal Behaviour (1961). The introduction, by Thorpe and Zangwill, says (p. ix): 'An interest in animal behaviour had existed in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory before the war, and given rise to some valuable studies. But work in this field was discontinued in 1940. ... Zangwill believed that the time was ripe for a revival of interest in comparative psychology.' Meetings were held three or four times a term in Thorpe's room in Jesus College (dominated by the enormous horn of an ancient gramophone), starting with a year-long analysis of the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb's seminal book Organisation of Behaviour (1969). This introduced what has come to be known as neural nets.
Zangwill's own paper in Current Problems is titled 'Lashley's concept of cerebral action'. Karl Lashley was famous for two principles: mass action and equipotentiality of the cerebral cortex. The danger (though not always recognized) was that lack of evidence for specific localized functions may be interpreted as no local functions. (This would be like assuming that there are no cars on the road in front when none is visible, in fog.) Zangwill says (p. 67): 'Although Lashley lacked a positive theory, he was convinced that the learning process does not depend upon specific anatomical structures or fixed patterns of neural connections. He adduced over and over again the negative effects of linear (trans-cortical) lesions on behaviour as evidence that the correlations between brain mass and performance level cannot be explained in terms of reduplication of equivalent neuronal arcs.' So Lashley was 'led to seek some mechanism widely distributed throughout the cortex and able to facilitate a variety of activities by the total mass rather than by "specific mechanisms" '. Zangwill comments (p. 69): 'In spite of the fact that Lashley's principles are certainly not incompatible with concepts of localisation, there can be no doubt that his work served to create a climate of opinion distinctly hostile to the whole idea.' How did this apply to human brain damage? Lashley himself claimed that 'there is ... little evidence of a finer cortical differentiation in man than in the rat' (1929). Zangwill comments (Current Problems 81): 'Although few would nowadays subscribe to the doctrine of localisation of function in its more extreme forms, it is difficult to accept the view that the cerebral cortex in man is in large part equipotential. Although this may perhaps be true of the cortex in early infancy, it certainly does not seem to be so after the development of speech.'
Theoretical issues of localizing function in complex systems, and especially of course the brain, were hotly debated in the department. It was questioned whether it was logically possible to specify local functions in a closely coupled system. Some experimental work, especially by Lashley, suggested that most of the cortex worked as a whole with 'mass action', and the influential Gestalt school (with good psychological observations though dubious physiology) also argued for this view of brain function. Undoubtedly there are logical problems for localization of functions (especially when for lack of theoretical models we do not know what these functions are), and such difficulties persist with current extremely exciting work on functional brain imaging using magnetic resonance techniques. Although Zangwill was impressed by Lashley's mass action and equipotentiality ideas, he also believed that the brain is organized in hierarchical (following Hughlings Jackson) functional modules. The brain is now often regarded as modular neural nets: partial destruction of artificial nets causing some typical neural disease symptoms. These issues, which dominated Zangwill's thinking, remain controversial.
Oliver Zangwill was the major founder of the Experimental Psychology Group, which was very influential, though sometimes critically described as an elitist Oxford and Cambridge club. It became the larger, still thriving Experimental Psychology Society with its Quarterly Journal, which Zangwill edited from 1958 to 1966. He was president of the EPS 1964–5. He was a member of the influential society, meeting annually in Austria from 1951, which founded the journal Neuropsychologia, which Zangwill edited for twenty years. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977.
An amusing story is told of Zangwill seeing a Korsakoff patient weekly. He would take a pen out of his pocket, and ask: 'Have you seen this before?' Every week the patient would say 'No'. At the final session, Zangwill asked: 'Have you seen this before?' The patient replied: 'Are you the man with all those pens?'
His life-long friend was Carolus Oldfield, professor of psychology at Oxford following George Humphrey. They wrote a series of significant papers on the concept of schema.
Oliver Zangwill made major contributions to the first edition of this book, advising especially on clinical psychology. His clinical work is remembered, and continues, in an institute named after him: the Oliver Zangwill Centre for neurological rehabilitation, in the Princess of Wales Hospital, Ely, near Cambridge. The Centre helps brain-injured patients, and it carries out fundamental research in neurology and psychology. Nothing could be more appropriate to the life and memory of Oliver Zangwill.
(Published 2004)
Zangwill was born in East Preston in Sussex, the youngest of three. His first recorded experiment was undertaken at the age of 8, at the expense of a lady who claimed to know infallibly when rats were present. Zangwill hid a rat under his collar, and kissed her, but she did not detect that anything was amiss. Could this be the origin of his lifelong sadness at the inconclusiveness of so many psychological experiments?
Zangwill told the writer that the most creative period of his life was at Edinburgh, during the Second World War, assessing brain damage in the Brain Injuries Unit. Records are scarce, but we may quote from his paper 'In defence of clinical psychology' (1966):
In 1940, a Brain Injuries Unity was set up in Edinburgh, under the direction of Mr (later Professor) D. K. (later Sir David) Henderson, Professor of Psychiatry in the University. The Unit was set up under University auspices with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and its staff held honorary appointments with the Department of Health for Scotland. Professor [Norman] Dott, who is a man of quite exceptional vision and enterprise, had no doubt that psychiatry and psychology could make a worthwhile contribution to the work of his Unit. In consequence, he invited the late Dr. Andrew Paterson to join the Unit as its psychiatrist and Peterson proposed that I should work with him as psychologist. This offer I accepted with alacrity.
Zangwill goes on to describe the aims and work: My own duties consisted mainly in the study and assessment of psychological defects after injuries to the brain. These were of all kinds and all degrees of severity. At the psychological level, brain injury may be expressed either in intellectual or personality changes of a general kind or in the form of relatively specific defects of a more or less circumscribed nature. Among that latter are defects in various aspects of perception and motor skill, in memory and learning capacity, and in the sphere of language — the aphasias and kindred disorders of speech. It was my job to assess these changes as accurately as I could, where possible by methods somewhat more sophisticated than those of ordinary neurological examination. ... It will be borne in mind that many of our patients were young Service men and women who could look forward to many years of active life ahead of them.
Later (Zangwill, 1966), assessing the value of this work, Zangwill concludes that they were able to define disabilities, which though mild had importance for resettlement, and began to develop methods of re-education. He believed, justly, that it marked 'the beginning of scientific interest in the re-education of the brain-injured in this country'. Perhaps as significant was the opportunity for research into implication of brain injury for general psychology, with questions such as: is intelligence unitary or composite? Do defects of language imply defect of intelligence? Are intellectual powers discretely localized in the brain? What is the significance of cerebral dominance for psychological activity? Problems of localizing brain function continued to fascinate Zangwill for the rest of his life. He thought that adequate theoretical models of brain function, related to psychology, were needed for classifying psychological problems for diagnosis and therapy. He believed that experimental psychology had an important role to play for clinical advances but was dissatisfied with the current state of understanding, This was an excellent starting point. Zangwill formulated three principles for rehabilitation following brain damage, set out in 'Psychological aspects of rehabilitation in cases of brain damage' (1947): Compensation — reorganization of psychological function; Substitution — building up a new method of response to replace one damaged irreparably. The final principle — Direct training — involves complex and not well-understood issues of how far damaged regions can be taken over by other brain regions, with or without special training. Here animal experiments are important though they do not always correspond to humans. Zangwill's three principles remain the basis of current clinical approaches to rehabilitation. After the Second World War, Zangwill became assistant director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology (as it was then known) at Oxford, working with its first professor, the Canadian psychologist George Humphrey.
He succeeded Sir Frederic Bartlett as professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge in 1952. He developed important links with physiology and zoology, especially with the subdepartment of animal behaviour at Madingley, through Bill Thorpe and later Robert Hinde. He continued his Edinburgh-inspired work on brain injury at the National Institute of Neurology at Queen Square in London, working especially with George Ettlinger, Michael Humphrey, Clifford Jackson, John McFie, Malcolm Piercy, Moyra Williams, Maria Wyke, Brenda Milner, and Elizabeth Warrington.
His own interests were many. One was handedness (he wrote Cerebral Dominance and its Relation to Psychological Function, 1960), and he wrote significant papers on aphasia, cerebral dominance and right-/left-handedness, amnesia, dyslexia, Korsakoff's psychosis, and more. His short book An Introduction to Modern Psychology (1950) was widely read.
With the zoologist William Thorpe FRS, Zangwill ran a remarkably successful discussion group from 1953 to 1958, which linked ethologists, physiologists, and psychologists, producing the book Current Problems of Animal Behaviour (1961). The introduction, by Thorpe and Zangwill, says (p. ix): 'An interest in animal behaviour had existed in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory before the war, and given rise to some valuable studies. But work in this field was discontinued in 1940. ... Zangwill believed that the time was ripe for a revival of interest in comparative psychology.' Meetings were held three or four times a term in Thorpe's room in Jesus College (dominated by the enormous horn of an ancient gramophone), starting with a year-long analysis of the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb's seminal book Organisation of Behaviour (1969). This introduced what has come to be known as neural nets.
Zangwill's own paper in Current Problems is titled 'Lashley's concept of cerebral action'. Karl Lashley was famous for two principles: mass action and equipotentiality of the cerebral cortex. The danger (though not always recognized) was that lack of evidence for specific localized functions may be interpreted as no local functions. (This would be like assuming that there are no cars on the road in front when none is visible, in fog.) Zangwill says (p. 67): 'Although Lashley lacked a positive theory, he was convinced that the learning process does not depend upon specific anatomical structures or fixed patterns of neural connections. He adduced over and over again the negative effects of linear (trans-cortical) lesions on behaviour as evidence that the correlations between brain mass and performance level cannot be explained in terms of reduplication of equivalent neuronal arcs.' So Lashley was 'led to seek some mechanism widely distributed throughout the cortex and able to facilitate a variety of activities by the total mass rather than by "specific mechanisms" '. Zangwill comments (p. 69): 'In spite of the fact that Lashley's principles are certainly not incompatible with concepts of localisation, there can be no doubt that his work served to create a climate of opinion distinctly hostile to the whole idea.' How did this apply to human brain damage? Lashley himself claimed that 'there is ... little evidence of a finer cortical differentiation in man than in the rat' (1929). Zangwill comments (Current Problems 81): 'Although few would nowadays subscribe to the doctrine of localisation of function in its more extreme forms, it is difficult to accept the view that the cerebral cortex in man is in large part equipotential. Although this may perhaps be true of the cortex in early infancy, it certainly does not seem to be so after the development of speech.'
Theoretical issues of localizing function in complex systems, and especially of course the brain, were hotly debated in the department. It was questioned whether it was logically possible to specify local functions in a closely coupled system. Some experimental work, especially by Lashley, suggested that most of the cortex worked as a whole with 'mass action', and the influential Gestalt school (with good psychological observations though dubious physiology) also argued for this view of brain function. Undoubtedly there are logical problems for localization of functions (especially when for lack of theoretical models we do not know what these functions are), and such difficulties persist with current extremely exciting work on functional brain imaging using magnetic resonance techniques. Although Zangwill was impressed by Lashley's mass action and equipotentiality ideas, he also believed that the brain is organized in hierarchical (following Hughlings Jackson) functional modules. The brain is now often regarded as modular neural nets: partial destruction of artificial nets causing some typical neural disease symptoms. These issues, which dominated Zangwill's thinking, remain controversial.
Oliver Zangwill was the major founder of the Experimental Psychology Group, which was very influential, though sometimes critically described as an elitist Oxford and Cambridge club. It became the larger, still thriving Experimental Psychology Society with its Quarterly Journal, which Zangwill edited from 1958 to 1966. He was president of the EPS 1964–5. He was a member of the influential society, meeting annually in Austria from 1951, which founded the journal Neuropsychologia, which Zangwill edited for twenty years. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977.
An amusing story is told of Zangwill seeing a Korsakoff patient weekly. He would take a pen out of his pocket, and ask: 'Have you seen this before?' Every week the patient would say 'No'. At the final session, Zangwill asked: 'Have you seen this before?' The patient replied: 'Are you the man with all those pens?'
His life-long friend was Carolus Oldfield, professor of psychology at Oxford following George Humphrey. They wrote a series of significant papers on the concept of schema.
Oliver Zangwill made major contributions to the first edition of this book, advising especially on clinical psychology. His clinical work is remembered, and continues, in an institute named after him: the Oliver Zangwill Centre for neurological rehabilitation, in the Princess of Wales Hospital, Ely, near Cambridge. The Centre helps brain-injured patients, and it carries out fundamental research in neurology and psychology. Nothing could be more appropriate to the life and memory of Oliver Zangwill.
(Published 2004)
— Richard L. Gregory
- Bibliography
- Gregory, R. L. (2001). 'Oliver Louis Zangwill'. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 47.
- Oldfield, R. C. and Zangwill, O. L. (1942a). 'Head's concept of the schema and its application in contemporary British psychology'. British Journal of Psychology, 32.
- — — — — (1942b). 'Head's concept of the schema and its application in contemporary British psychology'. British Journal of Psychology, 33.
- — — — — (1943). 'Head's concept of the schema and its application in contemporary British psychology'. British Journal of Psychology, 33.
- Zangwill, O. L. (1947). 'Psychological aspects of rehabilitation in cases of brain injury'. British Journal of Psychology, 37.
- — — (1966). 'In defence of clinical psychology'. Bulletin of the British Psychology Society, 19.
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