Nicholas Humphrey - Early Career

Early Career

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").

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

Read more about this topic:  Nicholas Humphrey

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:

    In an early spring
    We see th’appearing buds, which to prove fruit
    Hope gives not so much warrant, as despair
    That frosts will bite them.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    I seemed intent on making it as difficult for myself as possible to pursue my “male” career goal. I not only procrastinated endlessly, submitting my medical school application at the very last minute, but continued to crave a conventional female role even as I moved ahead with my “male” pursuits.
    Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)