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:
“No two men see the world exactly alike, and different temperaments will apply in different ways a principle that they both acknowledge. The same man will, indeed, often see and judge the same things differently on different occasions: early convictions must give way to more mature ones. Nevertheless, may not the opinions that a man holds and expresses withstand all trials, if he only remains true to himself and others?”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)