Jeffrey Alan Gray

Jeffrey Alan Gray (26 May 1934 to 30 April 2004) was a British research psychologist, born in the East End of London to a tailor who died when Jeffrey was seven. After military service he studied modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, then took a second degree in psychology and philosophy in 1959, trained as a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and gained his PhD there in 1964 in the department headed by Hans Eysenck. He lectured in experimental psychology at Oxford until 1983, when he succeeded Eysenck at the Institute of Psychiatry, and he retired from the chair in 1999. He is known for his biopsychological theory of personality and for his work on consciousness. In his late book Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem he argued that the intentionality of conscious experience arises from unconscious processing in the brain, which in his view makes a solution to the hard problem unlikely.