Jeffrey Alan Gray

Jeffrey Alan Gray (26 May 1934 – 30 April 2004) was a British psychologist. He was born in the East End of London. His father was a tailor, but died when Jeffrey was only seven. His mother, who ran a haberdashery, brought him up alone. Following military service (1952–54), he took up a MacKinnon scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford, with a place to study law. In the event he negotiated a switch to modern languages, obtaining a first in French and Spanish. He stayed on to take a second BA, this time in psychology and philosophy, which he completed in 1959.

In 1959–60 he trained as a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London (now part of King's College London), after which he stayed on to study for a PhD in the department of psychology, headed by Hans Eysenck. His PhD was awarded in 1964 for a study of environmental, genetic and hormonal influences on emotional behaviour in animals.

He then took an appointment as a university lecturer in experimental psychology at Oxford. He remained at Oxford until succeeding Eysenck at the Institute of Psychiatry in 1983. He retired from the chair of psychology in 1999, but continued his experimental research as an emeritus professor, and spent a productive year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, California. He served as the expert on psychology on the Gambling Review Body which produced the Gambling Review Report (2001).

In his book 'Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem' written towards the end of his life, Gray summarised his ideas about brain function and consciousness. He took the view that the contents of consciousness are usually about something, and this is described as intentionality or meaning. He suggested that intentionality is another aspect of the 'binding problem', as to how the different modalities, such as sight and hearing, are bound together into a single conscious experience. Gray argued that without such binding, eating a banana could involve seeing yellow, feeling a surface, and tasting something, without having the unifying awareness of a particular object known as a banana. Without such unifying binding, he argues that objects would be just meaningless shapes, edges, colours etc.

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