Zachary Irving is a member of the Faculty Research Council at the Contemplative Sciences Center. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of Philosophy, where he works in the philosophy of cognitive science. Throughout 2024, he has been pursuing an NEH fellowship titled, “The Spontaneity Deficit: Good Minds in the Age of Distraction.” That project split off into two books about the nature and value of attention and distraction: The Spontaneity Deficit and The Wandering Mind.