Nicholas Humphrey's Beautiful Theory of Mind

One night in 1966, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student named Nicholas Humphrey was working in a darkened psychology lab at the University of Cambridge. An anesthetized monkey sat before him; glowing targets moved across a screen in front of the animal, and Humphrey, using an electrode, recorded the activity of nerve cells in its superior colliculus, an ancient brain area involved in visual processing. The superior colliculus predates the more advanced visual cortex, which enables conscious sight in mammals. Although the monkey was not awake, the cells in its superior colliculus were firing anyway, their activation registering as a series of crackles issuing from a loudspeaker. Humphrey seemed to be listening to the brain cells "seeing."