Alva Noë
Alva Noë is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. He is writer and a philosopher who works on the nature of mind and human experience.
Noë received his PhD from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company and has recently begun a performative-lecture collaboration with Deborah Hay. Noë is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.
He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); and most recently, Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012). He is now at work on a book about art and human nature.
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Facing unresponsive brain-injury victims is a real-world example of the fact that we are locked out of the minds of others — but new research shows promise in restoring consciousness, says Alva Noë.
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A team of neuroscientists is calling on their field to rethink whether we can understand the mind by looking at the brain in isolation from the active life of the whole animal, says Alva Noë.
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The basic phenomenon of speaking, expressing meaning in words — and also that of copying or recording what we hear — is laid bare before our eyes by artist Alvin Lucier, says commentator Alva Noë.