Nicholas Humphrey
Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is an English neuropsychologist and writer whose work has focused on the evolution of consciousness and social intelligence. He carried out early research on visual perception after cortical damage in monkeys and collaborated with Lawrence Weiskrantz in research that led to the discovery of blindsight. He moved into ethology and, after doing fieldwork with mountain gorillas, was one of the first to formulate the social intelligence hypothesis. His more recent research, in collaboration especially with Daniel Dennett, has concentrated on the science and philosophy of phenomenal consciousness. His work builds towards a materialist theory of conscious experience in humans and animals, that explains it as a life-affirming illusion. These ideas, popularised in books including A History of the Mind, Seeing Red, Soul Dust and Sentience, have had considerable impact but remain controversial.
Humphrey has held academic posts at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, The New School for Social Research in New York, and the London School of Economics. He has presented television series on the development of the human mind and speaking on topics such as nuclear disarmament and belief in the supernatural.
Family and early life
Humphrey was born in London, into what The New Yorker described as "an illustrious family of intellectuals". His father, John H. Humphrey, was a pioneering immunologist and his mother, Janet Humphrey, a psychoanalyst who worked with Anna Freud. His paternal grandfather was the inventor H. A. Humphrey, and his great-aunt Edith Humphrey the first British woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry. His maternal grandparents were the Nobel-Prize winning physiologist, A. V. Hill, and the welfare pioneer Margaret Hill, sister of economist John Maynard Keynes.Humphrey described the "family affair" of science in the 2004 book Curious Minds. "I grew up feeling I carried a warrant to explore anything I chose, that I could indeed safely cross into areas "Not for Everybody.""
Education
Humphrey attended a boarding prep school and Westminster School He acted in school plays, including Shakespeare and Euripides. He read widely and kept a commonplace book, which he maintained into later life. At Westminster, he and his physics teacher designed an experiment to measure the speed of light using equipment set up along a London street.In his autobiography, Stephen Hawking recalls that in 1958, when he was sixteen and his family went to India for a year, he "stayed with the family of Dr. John Humphrey at their house in Mill Hill. The house had a basement that contained steam engines and other models made by John Humphrey’s father.". Humphrey recalls him as "quizzical" and "somewhat bossy".
In 1961 Humphrey went up to Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship, initially to read mathematics and physics. But he soon switched to physiology and psychology. His physiology tutor, Giles Brindley, introduced him to experimental neuroscience in dramatic fashion: Humphrey encountered Brindley standing in a salt bath, wearing a helmet from which a metal rod projected against his right eye, through which Brindley was passing electric current to his retina to study phosphenes, inspired by an experiment of Isaac Newton in the 1660s.
While an undergraduate, Humphrey edited with John Barrell the literary magazine Granta, the only scientist in the history of the magazine to do so.
Academic career
Cambridge and blindsight
Humphrey's doctoral research at Cambridge was notable for his pioneering study of a rhesus monkey, Helen, whose primary visual cortex had been surgically removed by his supervisor Lawrence Weiskrantz. When Humphrey first encountered Helen, she appeared to be completely blind. But, on a hunch that she might still be capable of using the subcortical mid-brain visual system, he decided to try new methods of "teaching her to see". He quickly established that she was capable of much more than anyone expected. He went on to work with this monkey for the next seven years. Her vision improved so far that eventually she was able to run around an arena, deftly avoiding obstacles, picking up tiny currants from the floor. When Humphrey and Daniel Dennett showed a film of Helen at a seminar of psychologists and philosophers "nobody guessed the truth: Helen was cortically blind."The findings with Helen encouraged Weiskrantz to investigate comparable phenomena in humans. Working with a patient known as D.B., who was blind in part of his visual field following brain damage, Weiskrantz and colleagues showed that D.B. could accurately "guess" the location of stimuli despite reporting no visual awareness. They termed this capacity blindsight, a dissociation between visual performance and conscious experience that has become central to contemporary research on consciousness.
The explanation of blindsight remains contested, with some critics claiming it is merely “degraded” normal vision. Humphrey himself characterizes it as perception without sensation. In a 2025 paper he has argued that blindsight is not strictly “unconscious”: rather it is a case of cognitive consciousness in the absence of phenomenal consciousness, i.e. “insentient vision”; and he suggested it is a return to an evolutionarily primitive stage, “the vision of fish and frogs”
Oxford and evolutionary aesthetics
After completing his doctorate, Humphrey became Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Oxford in 1967. There he investigated visual and colour preferences in monkeys and developed an evolutionary account of aesthetic response, based around the cognitive appeal of “rhyme”. His essay "The Illusion of Beauty", based on this work, was broadcast on BBC Radio and won the Glaxo Science Writers Prize in 1980.Cambridge, fieldwork, and social intelligence
Humphrey returned to Cambridge in 1970 as Assistant Director of the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, joining a department shaped by the ethologists Robert Hinde and Patrick Bateson. In this environment he developed the Darwinian approach to understanding mind and behaviour that became central to his later work.In 1971 he spent several months at Dian Fossey's gorilla study camp in the Virunga Mountains and later visited Richard Leakey's archaeological field site at Lake Turkana. These field experiences, combined with laboratory work on primate cognition, informed his thinking about the evolution of intelligence.
Humphrey noted that gorillas could display sophisticated problem-solving abilities under experimental conditions yet appeared to live relatively simple lives in the wild, with abundant food, few predators and limited need for complex tool use. This perceived mismatch between cognitive capacity and environmental demands led him to focus on social, rather than ecological, pressures in cognitive evolution.
In "The Social Function of Intellect", Humphrey argued that the advanced cognitive abilities of primates evolved primarily to deal with complex social environments rather than to solve purely ecological problems such as foraging or predator avoidance.
This thesis paralleled Alison Jolly's earlier 1966 observations of lemur social structures, which likewise emphasised the social context of primate intelligence. In Humphrey’s view, highly social animals must become "natural psychologists", using conscious introspection to model the minds of conspecifics. This work has been recognized as giving rise to the social intelligence hypothesis and the idea of “mind-reading”.
"Th Inner Eye" television series
In 1984 Humphrey resigned his academic post at Cambridge to write and present a Channel 4 television series, The Inner Eye, on the development of the human mind, broadcast in 1986 alongside a companion book of the same title. The Times newspaper described the tv series as “A rare series that inspires thought... a genuine advance in television technique.”Collaboration with Daniel Dennett
In 1987 Humphrey joined philosopher Daniel Dennett at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, collaborating on an empirically oriented theory of consciousness. During this period Humphrey also worked on Multiple Personality Disorder, exploring whether distinct personalities might correspond to distinct streams of consciousness.Darwin College and parapsychology research
In 1992 Humphrey was appointed to a Senior Research Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge, funded by the Perrott-Warrick Fellowship in parapsychology. He used this position to conduct a sceptical investigation of parapsychological claims, examining phenomena such as extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. This research led to the book Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief, published in the United States as Leaps of Faith.London School of Economics and psychopathology
In 1998 Humphrey took up a Senior Research Fellowship in Evolutionary Psychopathology at the London School of Economics, where he continued his theoretical work on consciousness and began a series of investigations into the placebo effect. He argued that the brain manages bodily healing resources through what he and John Skoyles term a "health management system. In this account, the body retains reserve healing capacities that are normally inhibited; placebo responses are thought to work by convincing this system to lift its restraints.Anti-nuclear activism
Humphrey became involved in the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s during the Cold War. In 1981 he delivered the Bronowski Memorial Lecture on the BBC, titled "Four Minutes to Midnight", referring to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which then stood at four minutes to midnight.Broadcast on BBC2 on 23 October 1981, the lecture analysed psychological factors that, in his view, inhibited effective public response to the nuclear threat. “We behave at times as though we have been hexed by the Bomb, put under a spell”. The BBC received "80 letters of appreciation, many of them from doctors and scientists". James Cameron in his column in the Guardian wrote “I was depressed to the limit and exhilarated to the sky by the BBC Bronowski lecture by Dr Nicholas Humphrey.. Dr Humphrey’s programme alone justified the invention of the telly” The 1986 BBC Annual Report noted that the Bronowski Memorial Lectures, which had begun in 1977, were terminated after his talk.
With psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, Humphrey co-edited the anthology In a Dark Time, a collection of writings on war, peace and life under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. The novelist, John Fowles, wrote in a review that “This book is the most painful and the most important published for many a long year". The book received the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize.