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.
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