As humans, we are fascinated by beauty in the world. With so much of it around us, it is natural to wonder whether it is a luxury or a necessary part of how we interact with the world. In this interview with the IAI's Ozbir Kip, neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey argues that the essence of beauty is rhyme and that we are programmed to seek connections and patterns across nature, art and music.

To discover more about the nature of beauty, come to the HowTheLightGetsIn festival on September 19-20th to hear Heather Widdows, Babette Babich, and Dasha Nekrasova on the theme "Too Beautiful To Be True." Buy tickets now.

Kip: You have a very broad area of research spanning the fields of psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and philosophy. What is it that makes you think these fields should be studied together?

Humphrey: I have always thought of psychology as being the central topic, or question, of our minds and how they give us a picture of the world we live in. I became a psychologist to begin with, but gradually, I drifted towards philosophy, partly because I always found myself asking questions which went beyond what I could immediately begin to study experimentally, especially when I went out to do field work in Africa with gorillas, and I came back with some big questions which I thought were going to be better addressed at a theoretical, philosophical level, and I haven’t looked back.

And are there things that philosophers can learn from the field of neuropsychology, in your opinion?

Yes, of course. I think philosophers can get a lot of correctives from science and from psychology. In a way, new ideas about the philosophy of mind have been driven increasingly by results from brain damage, from psychopathology, from evolutionary theory.

The phenomenon of blindsight, for example, which I think is one of the most crucial findings in the study of consciousness, shows that you can separate cognition from phenomenal experience. This is the phenomenon that occurs after damage to the visual cortex, where you can show that a subject can see—initially it was a monkey, but now, of course, we’ve studied human beings. They can tell the shape, color and dimensions of objects, where they are, their relationship to each other, and yet they’ll say all the time, “Yes, doctor, but there’s nothing there; I’m not having any experience.”

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Ideas can rhyme, concepts can rhyme—it’s not only sensory phenomena.

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That’s a very surprising finding. I think philosophers have still not taken on board quite what it means. It drives a wedge between what I’ve called cognitive consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Cognitive consciousness is to do with computing perceptions, memory, decision-making, and so on. I think that it uses a global workspace, and it was a clever invention in the course of the history of our animal minds, and I think it goes back a very long way, deep into the animal kingdom. Lots of animals have cognitive consciousness: frogs and snakes, and probably bumblebees as well. Very few animals have phenomenal consciousness. It may be restricted, I believe, to animals which have evolved in the last 200 million years, chiefly, and perhaps exclusively, mammals and birds.

In your latest book, you talk about how humans have adapted to seek, enjoy, and cherish beauty in the world. How do you characterize beauty?