Nicholas Humphrey has won the Dennett Prize 2026, the annual award of the International Center for Consciousness Studies (ICCS), which announced the decision on 2 January 2026. The committee selected him unanimously from 17 applications for work that significantly advances understanding of the brain and consciousness.
The prize is named for the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, whose work spanned philosophy of mind, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence. Humphrey is not the first laureate. Andy Clark received the inaugural award in 2025. The 2026 prize is worth USD 10,000, with travel and accommodation covered, and the recipient is invited to give a Dennett Lecture at the ICCS conference.
Key Takeaways
- If you are looking at the Dennett Prize 2026, know that Nicholas Humphrey was chosen unanimously by the five-member committee from 17 applications for work that significantly advances understanding of the brain and consciousness.
- The Dennett Prize 2026 is worth USD 10,000, covers travel and accommodation, and invites the winner to give a Dennett Lecture at the ICCS conference.
- Nicholas Humphrey’s 1967 study with Lawrence Weiskrantz showed that monkeys without a visual cortex could still be trained to detect and reach for certain visually presented objects, a finding that helped set the stage for debates about blindsight.
- Nicholas Humphrey’s 1976 essay “The Social Function of Intellect” argued that primates’ higher intellectual faculties evolved as adaptations to the complexities of social living rather than mainly to solve practical problems.
- If you are preparing a Dennett Prize nomination, you should gather a one-page account of the candidate’s contribution, a CV and a selected publication list, since self-nominations are allowed and the 2026 deadline was 15 December 2025.
Nicholas Humphrey Is the 2026 Dennett Prize Winner
Nicholas Humphrey is the 2026 winner of the Dennett Prize, an annual award for an outstanding scholar whose research significantly advances understanding of the brain and consciousness. The prize’s own description keeps the focus on the scholar’s research and its significant advances in understanding the brain and consciousness.
The 2026 competition recognized significant advances in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence. Nominations were due by 15 December 2025. Each one required a one-page account of the candidate’s contribution, a CV and a selected publication list, and self-nominations were allowed. That structure tells you a lot about the prize. It judges scholars on their own record and expects applicants to explain their work in plain terms.
The prize committee for 2026 comprised Susan Dennett, Keith Frankish, Giorgio Vallortigara, Dmitry Volkov and Andy Clark, the 2025 laureate. Their unanimous decision stands out in a field where researchers rarely agree on much, so the consensus itself is worth noting.
Humphrey is a prolific author with twelve books to his name. The most recent is Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. It takes up the question of when and why feeling first appeared in the natural world.
His research career began well before that. In a 1967 paper in Nature, Humphrey and Lawrence Weiskrantz reported that monkeys without a visual cortex could still be trained to detect and reach for certain visually presented objects. That finding helped set the stage for the debates about seeing without awareness that still shape the field today.
What the Dennett Prize Recognizes and Why It Honors Dennett
The Dennett Prize is an annual award from the International Center for Consciousness Studies (ICCS), given to an outstanding scholar whose research significantly advances understanding of the brain and consciousness. Its scope is broad. The 2026 competition recognized significant advances in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence, the same mix of fields that shaped Daniel Dennett’s own career.
Dennett, who lived from 1942 to 2024, was a philosopher and cognitive scientist whose work crossed those disciplines. In a January 2025 announcement, the University of Sussex described his work in exactly these terms, and it marked the first prize given in his name.
The inaugural competition drew 14 applications, and the committee unanimously chose Andy Clark, as the ICCS reported in December 2024. That small pool shows how specialized the field is, and it helps explain why a candidate’s whole record matters more than any single result.
Honoring Dennett through a prize that spans several disciplines keeps his interdisciplinary approach at the center of the award. A scholar who works across philosophy, biology and computing must show how those strands fit together, and that is the kind of work the prize sets out to recognize.
Monkey Vision Experiments That Revealed Blindsight
Humphrey’s early research began as a collaboration with Lawrence Weiskrantz, and it asked a question that seemed almost paradoxical: what could a monkey do after its visual cortex had been removed? In a 1967 report in Nature, the two researchers showed that such animals could be trained to detect and accurately reach for certain visually presented objects. Vision was supposed to depend on the visual cortex, yet these animals were still responding to what they saw.
The same puzzle appeared in human patients. A 1974 report in The Lancet defined an early human blindsight finding as visual localization and discrimination in a part of the visual field that the patient did not consciously see. The cases involved damage to the right occipital lobe, the region at the back of the brain that handles vision. Patients could point to or tell apart stimuli in the blind part of their field while reporting no conscious experience of them.
For you, the key idea is that seeing and conscious seeing can come apart. Information can enter the brain, guide behavior and even support accurate choices without ever reaching awareness. That separation changed how philosophers and neuroscientists framed the problem. If a system can use visual information without experiencing it, then consciousness cannot simply be the same thing as visual processing. Something further must be going on, and researchers have spent decades trying to identify what it is.
That is why blindsight remains a central reference point in consciousness debates. The monkey experiments and the human case reports together show that behavior and experience are not always the same, which is precisely the kind of question the Dennett Prize was created to honor.
Intellect as an Answer to Social Life
In 1976, Nicholas Humphrey published “The Social Function of Intellect” in Growing Points in Ethology. In it, he argued that primates’ higher intellectual faculties evolved as adaptations to the complexities of social living. His claim challenged the common view that intelligence exists mainly to solve practical problems, such as finding food or avoiding predators.
Humphrey’s central idea was that life in a group creates problems that only a sophisticated mind can handle. An individual must keep track of who is allied with whom, who has cheated, who can be persuaded, and how others are likely to act next. On this account, the hardest tasks an animal faces are not in the physical world but in its relationships with other animals.
That shift matters for debates about minds and behavior. If intellect is a social tool, then abilities such as anticipating another individual’s actions or managing its reactions are not side effects of a large brain. They may be the very reasons the brain grew in the first place. Researchers were pushed to ask whether primate behavior could be explained by simple learning alone, or whether it required some grasp of other individuals as agents with their own perspectives.
For you as a reader, the key point is that context shapes how we judge animal intelligence. A monkey reaching for an object in a laboratory and a monkey steering through the alliances of its troop may both show skill, but Humphrey’s argument suggests the second case reveals what intelligence was built for. His essay gave that idea an early and influential form, and it still frames discussions of primate cognition.
How the 2026 Winner Was Chosen
The 2026 competition asked for nominations by 15 December 2025. Each entry had to include a one-page account of the candidate’s contribution, a CV and a selected publication list. Applicants could also put themselves forward, since self-nominations were allowed.
The panel that judged the entries was made up of Susan Dennett, Keith Frankish, Giorgio Vallortigara, Dmitry Volkov and Andy Clark. Clark brought the perspective of the inaugural laureate, having won the prize in 2025.
The committee reviewed 17 applications. Its decision was unanimous, which means all five members agreed on the same candidate. In a field where scholars often disagree about fundamentals, that level of agreement stands out.
The required documents also shape what the committee could see. A one-page statement asks a candidate to say, in plain terms, what they contributed. The CV and publication list then show how that contribution fits into a longer body of work. Together, they let judges compare a whole career rather than a single paper, which is the emphasis the prize itself places on sustained impact.
Prize Money, Travel and the Rome Lecture
The 2026 prize is worth USD 10,000, and the rules also cover travel and accommodation, so the winner does not bear the cost of attending. The recipient is also invited to give a Dennett Lecture at the annual ICCS conference, which gives the award a platform in the field as well as a cash reward.
The ceremony was scheduled for 1 to 3 September at the Campidoglio in Rome, and it was set to conclude the conference. According to a 2026 announcement from Roma Tre University, Humphrey was to receive the prize from Andy Clark, the 2025 laureate.
Having the inaugural laureate present the award to the new winner creates a clear link between the first and second years of the prize. It also places the ceremony at the end of the programme, so the prize is presented once the conference’s talks and discussions have finished.
Following Humphrey’s Work and the Prize Ahead
If you want to see where Humphrey’s thinking has gone since his early experiments, start with Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, the Oxford University Press book from 2022. Read it with his earlier work on social life and intellect in mind. The book asks when and why feeling first appeared in nature, and his older ideas about primate minds help explain why he approaches that question as he does.
If your interest is in the prize itself, the 2026 requirements show what a serious nomination looks like. The committee asked for a one-page account of the candidate’s contribution, a CV and a selected publication list, and it accepted self-nominations. If you know a scholar whose work deserves recognition, gather those three items before the next call. The 2026 deadline was 15 December 2025, so check the ICCS prize page for the next round’s dates rather than assuming the same timetable.
If you are a student, try a simpler exercise. Choose one paper you admire and write a one-page summary of its contribution in plain language. That is the same skill the prize asks of candidates, and it will sharpen how you read Humphrey’s arguments about blindsight and social intelligence.
