Zac Irving is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of Philosophy, where he works in the philosophy of cognitive science. Throughout 2024, he pursued an NEH fellowship titled, “The Spontaneity Deficit: Good Minds in the Age of Distraction.” That project has split off into two books about the nature and value of attention and distraction: The Spontaneity Deficit and The Wandering Mind.
Much of Irving’s work develops a nascent field of study: the philosophy of mind-wandering. Mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts and has emerged as a leading topic in cognitive science. Yet this flurry of progress was not tethered to philosophical foundations. Irving’s work fills that gap, providing philosophical, scientific, and normative foundations for the study of mind-wandering, attention, and distraction.