Hans-Lukas Teuber was a neuropsychologist and educator.
Background
Teuber was born in Berlin, Germany, in August 7, 1916. He was one of two sons of Eugen Teuber and Rose Knopf. Teuber's interest in psychology was sparked at an early age by his parents, behavioral scientists who, under the auspices of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, founded a field station for the observation of chimpanzees in Tenerife, the Canary Islands; this colony was later made famous by the German gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, whose studies in Tenerife were documented in The Mentality of Apes (1924).
Education
Teuber received a classical education at a private German preparatory school and at the Collège Francais in Berlin, where he studied from 1926 to 1934 and received a baccalaureate degree. His intellectual interests were diverse: he enjoyed Greek and Roman literature, poetry, the natural sciences, and semantics. From 1935 to 1939 he studied at the University of Basel in Switzerland, where he pursued an interdisciplinary course of study and was a member of a discussion group that centered on the philosophy of science, specifically the dynamics between the natural and social sciences. It was at Basel that Teuber first became exposed to the workings of the central nervous system. Other courses included biology and zoology, embryology, and comparative anatomy. Teuber was granted a fellowship for study at Harvard in 1939, but the outbreak of war in Europe postponed his arrival in the United States until 1941. Teuber interrupted his graduate studies in psychology at Harvard between 1944 and 1946 to serve in the United States Naval Reserve.
He received his Ph. D. in experimental psychology from Harvard in 1947.
Career
He became an American citizen in 1944. He was stationed in California, where he worked closely with Dr. Morris B. Bender, head of neurology at the San Diego Naval Hospital. The experience, Teuber later wrote, provided "the final and decisive push in the direction of my chosen field. " Teuber and Bender published numerous joint papers on brain injury, specifically on visual and perceptual problems suffered by brain-damaged war veterans. It was Teuber's first encounter with the paradoxical notion that casualties of war can provide insight into normal functioning. As he later put it, "Certain kinds of blindness can illuminate sight, and certain forms of paralysis can tell us something about the normal bases of voluntary movement [and] the acquired amnesias of the injured brain can point us in the direction in which answers to the riddle of memory can be sought. "
After receiving his Ph. D. , Teuber became a research associate at the New York University (NYU) College of Medicine, where he continued his research in brain injury; he later became a professor in the department of psychiatry and neurology and in the NYU psychology department. From 1947 to 1961 he was also head of the psychophysiological laboratory at the NYU-Bellevue Medical Center, which, under his administration, became an internationally renowned research center. It was at the NYU laboratory that Teuber's research methodology, now considered standard procedure in neurological testing and diagnosis, was developed. Studying a group that ultimately comprised more than 500 brain-injured veterans from World War II and the Korea and Vietnam conflicts, augmented by children and adults who had suffered non-war-related brain injury, Teuber developed a battery of tests designed to evaluate tactile, auditory, and visual functioning. The purpose of these tests was to reveal the neurological impairment or deficit responsible for various behavioral manifestations. The reliability of the tests was ensured by Teuber's strict use of control groups and by the principle of the "double dissociation of symptoms, " which sought to ascribe definitively a particular deficit to a particular lesion. He also delineated the distinction between external sensory stimulation and internal, self-initiated movement, which causes in individuals what he called a "corollary discharge. " Teuber's work with the brain-injured was most significant in understanding how the brain functions with regard to visual, particularly spatial, perception.
Teuber and his wife lived in Dobbs Ferry, N. Y. , a suburb of New York City, until their move to Arlington, Massachussets, in 1961, when Teuber joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a professor and head of the psychology department. At that time, psychology was subsumed in the department of economics and social science at MIT. Teuber restructured staffing and curriculum, and by 1964, MIT conferred full departmental status on psychology and Teuber was named chairman. According to one colleague, under Teuber's direction "the MIT department became an almost compulsory stopping-off point in the U. S. A. for scientists from throughout the world with interests in brain function and psychology. "
He could read fluently in Latin, ancient Greek, English, French, and German, and was a gifted speaker in the latter three languages; his lectures at MIT drew standing-room-only crowds. In later life, he traveled with increasing frequency to Europe to promote the interchange of scientific information and personnel. He held several visiting lectureships, including that of Eastman professor at Oxford University in the 1971-1972 academic year.
He sat on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology (1956 - 1968) and the Journal of Psychiatric Research (1961 - 1964). Teuber disappeared while swimming off Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, where he was vacationing with his wife; he was presumed to have suffered a heart attack and drowned.