Nicholas Keynes Humphrey (born 27 March 1943) is an English neuropsychologist based in Cambridge, known for his work on evolution of primate

intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can ...

and

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

. He studied mountain gorillas with

Dian Fossey Dian Fossey (, January 16, 1932 – ) was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her murder in 1985. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of R ...

Rwanda Rwanda (; rw, u Rwanda ), officially the Republic of Rwanda, is a landlocked country in the Great Rift Valley of Central Africa, where the African Great Lakes region and Southeast Africa converge. Located a few degrees south of the Equator ...

; he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "

blindsight Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex, also known as the striate cortex or Brodmann Area 17. The term was coined by L ...

" after brain damage in monkeys; he proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect". He is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal ''

Granta ''Granta'' is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and ma ...

''. Humphrey played a significant role in the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s and delivered the BBC Bronowski memorial lecture titled "Four Minutes to Midnight" in 1981. His 10 books include ''Consciousness Regained'', ''The Inner Eye'', '' A History of the Mind'', ''Leaps of Faith'', ''The Mind Made Flesh'', ''Seeing Red'', and ''Soul Dust''. He has received several honours, including the

Martin Luther King Memorial Prize The Martin Luther King Memorial Prize was instituted by novelist John Brunner and his wife and was awarded annually to a literary work published in the US or Britain that was deemed to improve interracial understanding,Derek Humphry''Good Life, Go ...

, the Pufendorf Medal and the British Psychological Society's book award. He has been lecturer in psychology at Oxford, assistant director of the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge, senior research fellow at Cambridge, professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, and school professor at the

London School of Economics , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 milli ...

Family

Humphrey is the son of the immunologist John H. Humphrey and his wife Janet Humphrey (née Hill), daughter of the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist

Archibald Hill Archibald Vivian Hill (26 September 1886 – 3 June 1977), known as A. V. Hill, was a British physiologist, one of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research. He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or ...

and the social reformer Margaret Hill. His great uncle was the economist

John Maynard Keynes John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in ...

. Humphrey married Caroline Waddington, daughter of C. H. Waddington, in 1967 (divorced 1977). From 1977 to 1984 he was the partner of the English actress Susannah York. in 1994 he married Ayla Kohn, with whom he has two children, Ada (born 1995) and Samuel (born 1997).

Early career

Nicholas Humphrey was educated at

Westminster School (God Gives the Increase) , established = Earliest records date from the 14th century, refounded in 1560 , type = Public school Independent day and boarding school , religion = Church of England , head_label = Hea ...

(1956–61) and

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

(1961–67). His doctoral research at Cambridge, supervised by

Lawrence Weiskrantz Lawrence Weiskrantz (28 March 1926 – 27 January 2018) was a British neuropsychologist. Weiskrantz is credited with discovering the phenomenon of blindsight, and with establishing the role of the amygdala in emotional learning and emotional be ...

, was on the neuropsychology of vision in primates. He 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 (a capacity which, when it was later confirmed in human beings, came to be called "

"). On moving to Oxford, he turned his attention to evolutionary aesthetics. He did research on monkey visual preferences (especially colour preferences) and wrote the essay "The Illusion of beauty", which, as a radio broadcast, won the Glaxo Science Writers Prize in 1980.

Work in evolutionary psychology and philosophy of mind

He returned to Cambridge, to the Sub Department of Animal Behaviour in 1970, and there met

, who invited him to spend three months at her gorilla study camp in

. His experience with the gorillas, and a subsequent visit to

Richard Leakey Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (19 December 1944 – 2 January 2022) was a Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician. Leakey held a number of official positions in Kenya, mostly in institutions of archaeology and wildlife conse ...

's field-site on Lake Turkana, set Humphrey thinking about how cognitive skills – intelligence and consciousness – could have arisen as an adaption to social life. In 1976 he wrote an essay title
"The Social Function of Intellect"
which is widely regarded as one of the foundational works of

evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evo ...

and the basis for

Machiavellian intelligence In primatology, machiavellian intelligence is the capacity of an organism to be in a successful political engagement with social groups. The first introduction of this concept came from Frans de Waal's book ''Chimpanzee Politics'' (1982), which de ...

theory. This paper formed the basis of his first book, ''Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development of Mind'' (1983). In 1984 Humphrey left his academic post at Cambridge to work on his

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a fourth television service ...

television series ''The Inner Eye'', on the development of the human mind. This series was finished in 1986 with the release of a book of the same name. In 1987,

Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...

invited Humphrey to work with him at his Center for Cognitive Studies at

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

. They worked on developing an empirically based theory of consciousness, and undertook a study on

Multiple Personality Disorder Dissociative identity disorder (DID), better known as multiple personality disorder or multiple personality syndrome, is a mental disorder characterized by the presence of at least two distinct and relatively enduring personality states. The di ...

. Humphrey's next book, '' A History of the Mind'' (1992), put forward a theory on how consciousness as feeling rather than thinking may have evolved. This book won the inaugural British Psychological Society's annual Book of the Year Award in 1993. His writings on consciousness continued in ''The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Evolution and Psychology'' (2002), ''Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness'' (2006), and most recently ''Soul Dust: the Magic of Consciousness'' (2011). In this last book he puts forward a radical new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage inside our own heads – a show that paves the way for spirituality, and allows us to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what he calls the "soul niche".

Other work

Humphrey became active in the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s. This led to an invitation to deliver the Bronowski lecture on the BBC in 1981. He titled his lecture, on the dangers of the arms race, "Four Minutes to Midnight". With

Robert Lifton Robert Jay Lifton (born May 16, 1926) is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of ...

he edited an anthology of writings on war and peace, ''In a Dark Time'', which was released in 1984 and was awarded the

. In 1992, Humphrey was appointed to a Senior Research Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge funded by the Perrott-Warwick Fellowship in parapsychology. He 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'' (1995) (in America this book was published under the title ''Leaps of Faith''). Humphrey has worked on a number of TV and radio documentaries as well as ''The Inner Eye''. The topics range from the psychology of paranormal belief to the psycho-history of mediaeval animal trials. In 2005, he visited the

Ulas family The Ulas family of 19 is from rural southern Turkey. Five of the family (except for another, who has died) walk on all fours with their feet and the palms of their hands in what is called a "bear crawl". Their quadrupedal gait has never been report ...

of human quadrupeds in southern Turkey and published a report on them with John Skoyles and Roger Keynes. A documentary entitled ''The Family That Walks on All Fours'' based on this visit was broadcast on

BBC2 BBC Two is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It covers a wide range of subject matter, with a remit "to broadcast programmes of depth and substance" in contrast to the more mainstream a ...

in March 2006, and on NOVA in November 2006. Over the last ten years Humphrey has been investigating the

placebo effect A placebo ( ) is a substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like Saline (medicine), saline), sham surgery, and other procedures. In general ...

, and has put forward a novel theory with John Skoyles of what he calls the "

health management system The health management system (HMS) is an evolutionary medicine regulative process proposed by Nicholas Humphrey reprinted from in which actuarial assessment of fitness and economic-type cost–benefit analysis determine the body’s regulation ...

" through which the brain has top-down control over the body's healing resources. He has recently become an Advisor to the

BMW Guggenheim Lab The BMW Guggenheim Lab was a collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the BMW Group between 2011 and 2013. Part urban think tank, part community center and part gathering space, the interdisciplinary mobile laboratory explor ...

, and in 2016 he gave the annual

Medawar Lecture The Medawar Lecture was an annual lecture on the philosophy of science organised by the Royal Society of London in memory of Sir Peter Medawar. It was last delivered in 2004 after which it was merged with the Wilkins Lecture and the Bernal Lectur ...

at UCL. Humphrey is an

atheist Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no ...

and suggested the analogy of religion to viruses to

Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. An ...

.Andrew Brown
"The human factor"
''The Guardian'', 29 July 2006.

National Life Stories National Life Stories is an independent charitable trust and limited company (registered as the ‘National Life Story Collection’) based within the British Library Oral History section, whose key focus and expertise is oral history fieldwork. S ...

conducted an oral history interview (C1672/12) with Nicholas Humphrey in 2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.National Life Stories, "Jones, Steve (1 of 13) National Life Stories Collection: Science and Religion"
The British Library Board, 2016. Retrieved 9 October 2017.

Bibliography

*
Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development of Mind
', Oxford University Press, 1983. *''In a Dark Time'', (ed. with R. J. Lifton), Faber & Faber 1984, Harvard University Press, 1984. *''The Inner Eye: Social Intelligence in Evolution'', Faber & Faber, 1986; Oxford University Press 2002,

*''A History of the Mind'', Chatto & Windus 1992, Simon & Schuster, 1992. *''Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief'', Chatto & Windus, 1995. *''How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem'', Imprint Academic, 2000. *''The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Evolution and Psychology'', Oxford University Press, 2002. *''Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness'', Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2006. *''Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness'', Quercus Publishing, 2011, Princeton University Press, 2011

Video links

* . * . * . * . * . * . *
"The Pufendorf Lectures 2011"
'.

Journal articles

"Vision in monkeys after removal of the striate cortex"
''Nature'', 215, 515–597, 1967.
"Contrast illusions in perspective"
''Nature'', 232, 91- 93, 1971.
"Interest and pleasure: two determinants of a monkey’s visual preferences"
''Perception'', 1, 395–416, 1972.
"The illusion of beauty"
''Perception'', 2, 429–39, 1973.
"The apparent heaviness of colours"
''Nature'', 250, 164–165, 1974. (With E. Pinkerton.)
"The reaction of monkeys to fearsome pictures"
''Nature'', 251, 500–2, 1974.
"Vision in a monkey without striate cortex: a case study"
''Perception'', 3, 241–55, 1974.
"Species and individuals in the perceptual world of monkeys"
''Perception'', 3, 105–14, 1974.
"Interactive effects of unpleasant light and unpleasant sound"
''Nature'', 253, 346–347, 1975. (With G. R. Keeble.)
"How monkeys acquire a new way of seeing"
''Perception'', 5, 51–56, 1976.
"Unfoldings of mental life"
''Science'', 196, 755–756, 1977.
"Do monkeys subjective clocks run faster in red light than in blue"
''Perception'', 6, 7–14.
"Effects of red light and loud noise on the rate at which monkeys sample the sensory environment"
''Perception'' 7:343–348 1978.
"Speaking for our selves: an assessment of multiple personality disorder"
''Raritan'', 9, 68–98.
"Varieties of altruism – and the common ground between them"
''Social Research'' 64:199–209, 1997.
"Cave art, autism and the evolution of the human mind"
''Cambridge Archaeological Journal'', 8, 165–191, 1998.
"Why Grandmothers May Need Large Brains"
''

Psycoloquy Psycoloquy was a refereed interdisciplinary open access journal that was published from 1990 to 2002 and was sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) and indexed by APA's PsycINFO and the Institute for Scientific Information. The ...

'' 10(024), 1999.
"How to solve the mind-body problem"
''Journal of Consciousness Studies'' 7(4):5–20 2000.
"In Reply (Reply to Commentaries on How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem)"
''Journal of Consciousness Studies'' 7(4):98–112, 2000.
"One Self: a Meditation on the Unity of Consciousness"
''Social Research'' 67(4):32–39 2000.
"Dreaming as play"
''Behavioral and Brain Science'', 23, 953, 2000.
"Shamanism and cognitive evolution (Commentary on Michael Winkelman)"
''Cambridge Archaeological Journal'', 12, 91–3, 2002.
"Human handwalkers: five siblings who never stood up"
''CPNSS Discussion Paper'', DP 77/05, 2005.
"The society of selves"
''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 362, 745–754, 2007.
"Getting the measure of consciousness"
''Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement'', 2008.

Other works

"The social function of intellect"
In ''Growing Points in Ethology'', ed. P. P. G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde, pp. 303– 317, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976.
"Nature's Psychologists"
In Josephson, B. D. and Ramachandran, V. S. (eds), ''Consciousness and the Physical World'', chapter 4, 57–80. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980.
"Status and the left cheek"
''New Scientist'', 59, 437–49, 1973.
"The colour currency of nature"
In ''Colour for Architecture'', T. Porter and B. Mikellides (eds), pp. 95–98, Studio-Vista, London, 1976.
"The biological basis of collecting"
''Human Nature'' 44–47 1979.
"Natural aesthetics2
In ''Architecture for People'', ed. B. Mikellides, pp. 59–73, Studio-Vista, London, 1980.
"Four Minutes to Midnight"
The BBC Bronowski Lecture, 1981.
"Consciousness: a Just-So story"
''New Scientist'', 95 473–477, 1982.
"What shall we tell the children?"
In Williams, Wes (ed.), ''The Values of Science (The 1997 Oxford Amnesty Lectures)'', 58–79. Westview Press, 1998.
"The Uses of Consciousness"
''Fifteenth James Arthur Memorial Lecture'', 1–25,

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 int ...

, New York, 1987.
"The Placebo Effect"
In Gregory, Richard L. (ed.), ''Oxford Companion to the Mind''. Second Edition, Oxford University Press, 2004.
"Thinking about Feeling"
In Gregory, Richard L. (ed.), ''Oxford Companion to the Mind''. Second Edition, Oxford University Press, 2004.
"The Privatization of Sensation"
In Heyes, Celia and Huber, Ludwig (eds), ''The Evolution of Cognition'', 241–252. MIT, Cambridge, Ma, 2000. *
"Killer Instinct: a Review of Niall Ferguson's "World of War: History's Century of Hatred"
''Prospect'', September 2006
"Consciousness: the Achilles heel of Darwinism? Thank God, not quite"
In ''Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement'', ed. John Brockman, pp. 50–64, New York: Vintage, 2006.
"Great Expectations: The Evolutionary Psychology of Faith-Healing and the Placebo Effect"
, ''The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution'', chapter 19, 255–85, Oxford University Press, 2002.
"Questioning consciousness
, ''Seed Magazine'', January/February,30-32, 2008.
"Follow My Leader"
In Humphrey, Nicholas, ''The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Evolution and Psychology'', chapter 24, 330–339. Oxford University Press, 2002.
"The Deformed Transformed"
In Humphrey, Nicholas, ''The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution'', chapter 14, 165–199. Oxford University Press 2002.
"Bugs and Beasts before the Law"
''The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution'', chapter 18, 235–254, Oxford University Press 2002.
"Behold the Man"
In Humphrey, Nicholas, ''The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution'', chapter 16, 206–231, Oxford University Press, 2002.
"A Family Affair"
In ''Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist '', ed. John Brockman, pp. 3–12, New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.
"Do babies know what they look like? Doppelgängers and the phenomenology of infancy"
In Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (eds), ''Perspectives on Imitation: From Cognitive Neuroscience to Social Science''. Cambridge:

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publ ...

(2005)
"Beauty’s child: sexual selection, nature worship and the love of God"

References

External links

Professor Humphrey's home page
*

by Andrew Brown. 29 July 2006,

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...

. Newspaper interview.
EDGE talk, A Self worth having A Talk with Nicholas Humphrey
Interview on

EDGE Edge or EDGE may refer to: Technology Computing * Edge computing, a network load-balancing system * Edge device, an entry point to a computer network * Adobe Edge, a graphical development application * Microsoft Edge, a web browser developed ...

30 June 2003 *
Video

"The Evolved Self-Management System"
EDGE, 5 December 1011
The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies interview with Nicholas Humphrey

Guardian review of Soul Dust
{{DEFAULTSORT:Humphrey, Nicholas 1943 births Academics of the London School of Economics British psychologists British consciousness researchers and theorists Critics of parapsychology English atheists English sceptics Evolutionary psychologists Human evolution theorists Fellows of Darwin College, Cambridge Living people Keynes family Theoretical biologists Reeves family