is impaired when a task is performed with conscious effort. His work on classical conditioning revealed that the context in which a stimulus is presented majorly affects how the subject learns to respond, which he discussed in his second book, The Nature of Learning (1933). This book is considered by Queen's University to be his most important work. It brought attention to the concept of living organisms being "systems" that are regulated by homeostasis, physiologically and psychologically. In 1951, he wrote Thinking: An Introduction to Its Experimental Psychology, which had considerable success as it provided a written description of all research done on mental problem solving in humans conducted by Otto Selz, the Würzburg School, and other Gestalt psychologists. Their findings largely supported Humphrey's assertion—discussed in his book Directed Thinking (1948)—that a sequence of thoughts is governed by motivation. Humphrey thought that mental escapism could have great benefits and was healthy within reason. He particularly believed that watching movies helped "soothe the raw nerves" of people living in a post-war era. To him, escapism provided a means of coping with other aspects of everyday life that were overly restrictive, like work. Under the alternate pen name Donald MacPherson, Humphrey wrote two other books. Go Home Unicorn and Men Are Like Animals were science fiction novels that drew from Freudian psychology and were published pseudonymously in 1935 and 1937, respectively. Bibliography The Story of Man's Mind, 1923 The Nature of Learning in Its Relation to the Living System, 1933 Go Home, Unicorn, 1935 Men Are Like Animals, 1937 Directed Thinking, 1948 Thinking: An Introduction to its Experimental Psychology, 1951 Social Psychology through Experiment as a co-editor, 1963 Psychology through Experiment as a co-editor, 1963 The Chemistry of Thought with R.V. Coxon, 1963 References 1889 births 1966 deaths British psychologists Academics of the University of Oxford Fellows of the Royal Society of Chemistry Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni People from Kent Alumni of the University of Oxford Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge 20th-century British psychologists Presidents of the Canadian Psychological Association