Nicholas Humphrey - Other Work

Other Work

Humphrey became active in the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s. This led to an invitation to deliver the Bronowski lecture on the BBC in 1981. He titled his lecture, on the dangers of the arms race, "Four Minutes to Midnight". With Robert Lifton he edited an anthology of writings on war and peace titled In a Dark Time, which was released in 1984 and resulted in him winning the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize.

In 1992, Humphrey was appointed to a Senior Research Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge funded by the Perrott-Warwick Fellowship in parapsychology. He undertook a skeptical study of parapsychological phenomena such as extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis, resulting in his book Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief (1995) (in America this book was published under the title Leaps of Faith).

Humphrey has worked on a number of TV and radio documentaries as well as "The Inner Eye". The topics range from the psychology of paranormal belief to the psycho-history of mediaeval animal trials.

In 2005, he visited the Ulas family of human quadrupeds in southern Turkey and published a report on them with John Skoyles and Roger Keynes. A documentary "The Family That Walks On All Fours" based on this visit was broadcast on BBC2 in March 2006, and on NOVA in November 2006.

Over the last ten years Humphrey has been investigating the placebo effect, and has put forward a novel theory of what he calls the "health management system" through which the brain has top-down control over the body’s healing resources.

He has recently become an Advisor to the BMW Guggenheim Lab.