Discover the Best Books Written by Jeffrey A. Gray

Jeffrey Alan Gray (26 May 1934 – 30 April 2004) was a British psychologist who is notable for his contributions to the theory of consciousness. 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 studied for a Ph.D. in the psychology department headed by Hans Eysenck. His Ph.D. was awarded in 1964 for a study of environmental, genetic, and hormonal influences on emotional behavior in animals.

He then made 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 in 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 believed that the contents of consciousness are usually about something, which 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 argued that objects would be just meaningless shapes, edges, colors, and tastes.

Gray thought that intentionality was based on unconscious processing. For example, he argued that the processing in the visual cortex that underlies conscious perception is not itself conscious. Instead, perception springs into consciousness fully formed, including the intentionality of what the conscious perception is about. In arguing for this, Gray used the example of pictures that can be either of two things, such as a duck or a rabbit. 

They are never hybrid but are always completely duck or completely rabbit. The perception of a duck or a rabbit is constructed unconsciously up to the last moment. Gray's conclusion from this part of his discussion is that intentionality arises from the physical and chemical structure of the brain, but also that if intentionality can be constructed out of unconscious processing, it is unlikely to produce a solution to the 'hard problem' of how consciousness arises.