Daniel C. Dennett: Nick Humphrey is a great romantic scientist, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it isn't. Nick's early pioneering work in recording the firing of individual neurons in live animals, in cats, helped pave the way for work by the neuroscientists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. They got the 1981 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on such single-cell recordings in cats, but it was a technique that Nick had helped develop. Very typically, once he got the technique developed, he thought, "Well, I can spend the rest of my life doing this, or I can do something else. I don't see what the residual problems are." Of course, there were lots of problems, but at any rate, typical of Nick, he wanted to turn to other things as soon as he'd done that.
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NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a psychologist; senior research fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge; author of Consciousness Regained (1983), The Inner Eye (1986), A History of the Mind (1992), and Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation (1996).
Nicholas Humphrey's Edge Bio Page