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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In a new study, neither control subjects nor those who used Lumosity games showed improvement beyond getting better at the specific games they were playing, says blogger Alva Noë.
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This simple question posed by ecologist Fred Smith led to profound discoveries about delicate balance and styles of regulation in healthy ecosystems, a topic covered in a new book Alva Noë considers.
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It ought to be possible to compare the DNA of a random individual with DNA from around the world to make a call on ethnicity, but there are problems with tests of this kind, says commentator Alva Noë.
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Last month, Alva Noë's family bought their first new car — a VW Golf Sportwagen TDI — paying premium for what they thought was a fuel efficient, clean diesel; he tries to understand what went wrong.
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There's a lot of coughing in audiences at concerts and plays. Why? Commentator Alva Noe suggests that the answer has something to do with the importance of art.
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What rankles so many of Lance Armstrong's detractors is the sense that somehow, he artificially enhanced himself to reach seemingly superhuman heights. Yet the story of modern humans, argues philosopher Alva Noe, is a story of our integration with artificial and mechanical enhancements.