The conceptual nervous system of J.A. Gray: schizophrenia and consciousness.

This special issue is the second of two that honour Prof. Jeffrey Gray and were occasioned by his official retirement. The first went to press shortly before his death and so this second special issue must now be a memorial rather than the Festschrift that we had hoped to deliver to him. The first special issue (Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2004, No 3) concentrated on state and trait aspects of anxiety—a topic that primarily engaged Jeffrey in the first part of his academic endeavours, culminating in “The Neuropsychology of Anxiety: an enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system” (Gray, 1982). In the year following publication of this seminal work he moved from Oxford to London to take up the Chair in Psychology at the Maudsely Institute of Psychiatry and concurrently shifted his focus of interest towards schizophrenia and consciousness (Gray, 1995). The rule for including the contributors to Jeffrey’s Festschrift was that the authors were all people who have worked with Jeffrey and whose work, as evidenced by their papers, has been strongly influenced by him. There were insufficient potential contributions to create a special issue on consciousness but, as luck would have it, a book by Jeffrey on the subject (Gray, 2004) was published just before his death. The papers in this special issue will speak for themselves and to many aspects of Jeffrey’s theory of “the neuropsychology of schizophrenia” (Gray et al., 1991). Together with his book on consciousness and the first of these special issues there is coverage of an amazing range of neuropsychological territory within what is fundamentally a single theoretical integration. Jeffrey himself would have been the last to suggest that this integration was complete. But perhaps his greatest contribution to those who worked with him was an unswerving credo. He passed on to us the belief that ultimately there could be a proper integration of mental and neural constructs, each informed by and consistent with the other. “It can lead us not just to a theory