| The Third Culture |
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 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 neuroscientists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. The 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. | Nicholas
Humphrey "What is it like to be ourselves? How can a piece of matter which is a human be the basis for the experience each one of us recognizes as what it's like to be us? How can a human body and a human brain also be a human mind?." NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist at the Centre
for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, and
the author of Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A
History of the Mind, and >Leaps
of Faith:
Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation. Further Reading: "The Thick
Moment" in The Third Culture
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