The work that I'm best known for is flow theory and the studies of flow experience. People have applied the studies all over the world, and it has influenced many schools, factories, offices, and even political systems.

If I were to try to go back to the origins of the theory, I would say that it probably started germinating in 1944-45, when I was ten years old. At that time the war was creating a lot of anxiety everywhere, and as a ten-year-old I saw the whole world I took for granted crumbling. I realized, however, that when I played chess, I completely forgot what was going on, and for hours I had a great time. I felt completely involved, my mind was working, I had to be alert, and I had to process information about what was happening. I didn't have any chance to be distracted or any chance to worry about anything. I also noticed then that if I played against somebody really good, it wasn't much fun. If I played against somebody who played badly, it wasn't fun either because I started getting distracted and thinking about other things. But if my opponent was somebody in my own range of abilities, then the game was fun.

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI (1934–2021) was a Hungarian-born polymath who recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow," a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. He was Claremont Graduate University’s Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management as well as founder and co-director of the Quality of Life Research Center (QLRC), a nonprofit research institute that studies positive psychology, which looks at human strengths such as optimism, creativity, intrinsic motivation, and responsibility. Csikszentmihalyi was also former head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

His research and theories on the psychology of optimal experience have revolutionized psychology and have been adopted in practice by national leaders such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as well as top members of the global executive elite who run the world's major corporations. Csikszentmihalyi is the author of several popular books about his theories, including the bestselling Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; The Evolving Self; Creativity; Finding Flow; and Good Business. The Wall Street Journal has listed Flow among the six books "every well-stocked business library should have." Though published in the early 1990s, Flow has continued to draw attention from both researchers and the general public and has been translated into more than twenty languages. 

He was a member of the American Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Leisure Studies. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Edge Bio Page

I have been trying, under the banner of "New Realism," to reconcile various philosophical and scientific traditions. I'm looking for a third way between various tensions. There's more to a human being than the fact that we are a bunch of cells that hang together in a certain way. Humans are not strictly identical to any material energetic system, even though I also think that humans cannot exist without being, in part, grounded in a material energetic system. So, I am rejecting both brutal materialism, according to which we are nothing but an arrangement of cells, and brutal idealism, according to which our minds are transcendent affairs that mysteriously peep into the universe. Both are false, so there has to be a third way.

Similarly, there must be a third way between postmodernism, which denies the objectivity of human knowledge claims and science altogether, and various trends in cognitive science, which also threaten objectivity without, of course, fully undermining it (for instance, research on cognitive biases better be immune to second-order biases). Similarly, I believe we urgently need to reconcile so-called continental philosophy—European traditions, broadly construed—and analytic philosophy, which means philosophy at its best when practiced in Anglophone context; there has to be something in between. That space in between is what I call New Realism. 

MARKUS GABRIEL, one of the founders of New Realism, holds the Chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn, where he is also Director of the International Center for Philosophy and the multidisciplinary Center for Science and Thought. He is the author of Why the World Does Not Exist. Markus Gabriel's Edge Bio Page

Although we have made tremendous progress in understanding many details of the brain, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. What's relevant to me, as somebody who's interested in the nature of moral behavior, is how little we understand about the nature of reasoning, or if I may use a different expression, problem solving. I don't know what reasoning is. For a long time, people seemed to think it was completely separate from emotion, but we know that can't be true.

The nature of problem solving is something that is still very much in the pioneering stages in neuroscience. It's a place where neuroscience and psychology can cooperate to get interesting experimental paradigms so that we can attack the question: How is it that, out of all these constraints and factors, a reasonable decision can be made? That's a tough one. It will require us to find good experimental paradigms and new techniques.

PATRICIA S. CHURCHLAND is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. Her research has centered on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy, with a current focus on the association of morality and the social brain. She is the author of Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition. Patricia S. Churchland's Edge Bio Page

We're now going through a phase of history where people are so blown away at the success of physical science and the wonderful technology it's produced that they've forgotten its philosophical underpinnings. They've forgotten its inherent limitations. If we want a science of consciousness, we need to move beyond Galileo. We need to move to what I call a post-Galilean paradigm. We need to rethink what science is. That doesn't mean we stop doing physical science or we do physical science differently—I'm not here to tell physical scientists how to do their jobs. It does, however, mean that it's not the full story. We need physical science to encompass a more expansive conception of the scientific method. We need to adopt a worldview that can accommodate both the quantitative data of physical science and the qualitative reality of consciousness. That's essentially the problem.

Fortunately, there is a way forward. There is a framework that could allow us to make progress on this. It's inspired by certain writings from the 1920s of the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington, who is incidentally the first scientist to confirm general relativity after the First World War. I'm inclined to think that these guys did in the 1920s for the science of consciousness what Darwin did in the 19th century for the science of life. It's a tragedy of history that this was completely forgotten about for a long time for various historical reasons we could talk about. But, it's recently been rediscovered in the last five or ten years in academic philosophy, and it's causing a lot of excitement and interest.

PHILIP GOFF is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University, UK, and author of Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (forthcoming, 2019). Philip Goff's Edge Bio Page