Nicholas Humphrey
| Nicholas Humphrey | |
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Nicholas Humphrey
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| Born | Nicholas Keynes Humphrey 27 March 1943 |
| Residence | Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Institutions | London School of Economics |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | Lawrence Weiskrantz |
| Doctoral students | Dylan Evans |
Nicholas Keynes Humphrey (born 27 March 1943) is an English psychologist, based in Cambridge, who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide ranging. He 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 celebrated theory of the "social function of intellect" and he is the only scientist ever to edit the literary journal Granta.
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 ten 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 been the recipient of several honours, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, 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.
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. His great uncle was the economist John Maynard Keynes. He 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. He married Ayla Kohn in 1994, with whom he has two children Ada 1995 and Samuel 1997.
Nicholas Humphrey was educated at Westminster School (1956–61), and Trinity College, Cambridge (1961–67).
His doctoral research at Cambridge, supervised by Lawrence Weiskrantz, 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 "blindsight").
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