Gaurav Suri is an associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. He is a computational neuroscientist and an experimental psychologist. He is the director of RADLab, where he studies the mechanisms that shape motivated action and decision making. He is the co-author of the prize-winning novel A Certain Ambiguity and several dozen influential research papers.

Jay McClelland is a professor of psychology and (by courtesy) of computer science and linguistics at Stanford University. He is one of the most influential and well-known cognitive scientists of the past century. He is the founder of the study of artificial neural networks, and his publications have been cited more than 100,000 times. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

The authors met in 2014. The Emergent Mind is their first book together.