1. Nicholas Keynes Humphrey was born on 27 March 1943 and is an English neuropsychologist based in Cambridge, known for his work on the evolution of primate intelligence and consciousness.
17 Facts About Nicholas Humphrey
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Nicholas Humphrey studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; he proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect".
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Nicholas Humphrey is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal Granta.
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Nicholas Humphrey has received several honours, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal and the Mind and Brain Prize.
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Nicholas Humphrey has been lecturer in psychology at Oxford, assistant director of the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge, professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, and school professor at the London School of Economics.
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Nicholas Humphrey was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Nicholas Humphrey made the first single cell recordings from the superior colliculus of monkeys, and discovered the existence of a previously unsuspected capacity for vision after total lesions of the striate cortex.
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Nicholas Humphrey did research on monkey visual preferences and wrote the essay "The Illusion of beauty", which, as a radio broadcast, won the Glaxo Science Writers Prize in 1980.
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Nicholas Humphrey returned to Cambridge, to the Sub Department of Animal Behaviour in 1970, and there met Dian Fossey, who invited him to spend three months at her gorilla study camp in Rwanda.
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In 1984 Nicholas Humphrey left his academic post at Cambridge to work on his Channel 4 television series The Inner Eye, on the development of the human mind.
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Nicholas Humphrey became active in the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s.
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Nicholas Humphrey titled his lecture, on the dangers of the arms race, "Four Minutes to Midnight".
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In 1992, Nicholas Humphrey was appointed to a Senior Research Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge funded by the Perrott-Warwick Fellowship in parapsychology.
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Nicholas Humphrey undertook a sceptical study of parapsychological phenomena such as extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis, resulting in his book Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief.
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Nicholas Humphrey has worked on a number of TV and radio documentaries as well as The Inner Eye.
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Nicholas Humphrey has recently become an Advisor to the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and in 2016 he gave the annual Medawar Lecture at UCL.
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Nicholas Humphrey is an atheist and suggested the analogy of religion to viruses to Richard Dawkins.