Nicholas Humphrey
b. 1943 · British neuropsychologist and writer on consciousness and social intelligence
Nicholas Humphrey (born London, 1943) is a British neuropsychologist and writer whose work concerns the evolution of consciousness and social intelligence. His research sits between evolutionary psychology and the philosophy of mind, and his ideas have had considerable impact while remaining controversial.
His early research at Cambridge examined visual perception in monkeys after damage to the cortex. Working with Lawrence Weiskrantz, he took part in the research that led to the discovery of blindsight, the capacity to respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness of them. He later did fieldwork with mountain gorillas and was among the first to propose the social intelligence hypothesis: primate intelligence, on this view, evolved mainly to manage complex social life rather than ecological problems. In collaboration with Daniel Dennett, he developed a materialist account of conscious experience that treats it as a life-affirming illusion.
Humphrey has held academic posts at Oxford, Cambridge, the New School for Social Research and the London School of Economics, and has presented television series on the human mind. His books include A History of the Mind (1992), Seeing Red (2006), Soul Dust (2011) and Sentience (2023). His influence is most visible in debates about animal consciousness and in the idea of social "mind-reading".
Key ideas
- Social intelligence: primate intelligence evolved mainly to handle complex relationships within the group.
- Blindsight: vision can operate without the person being consciously aware of it, separating perceptual performance from conscious experience.
- Consciousness as illusion: subjective experience is a construction of the mind with a vital function, not a separate property beyond matter.
- Evolutionary aesthetics: visual preferences, such as the appeal of natural "rhyme", may have a cognitive basis.
Curiosities
A family of scientists
He came from a family of scientists and intellectuals; his mother was a psychoanalyst who worked with Anna Freud, and his maternal grandfather, A. V. Hill, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology.
A monkey named Helen
His doctoral research followed for years a rhesus monkey named Helen, whose primary visual cortex had been removed and who, surprisingly, could avoid obstacles and pick up tiny objects from the floor.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.