Alva Noë is an author and philosopher based in Berkeley and New York City.His new book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature is due out in September 2015 from Hill and Wang/FSG).He is the author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang, 2009), Action In Perception (MIT 2004), as well as Varieties of Presence, which was published by Harvard University Press in February 2012.Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, in Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Noë blogs weekly at NPR's 13.7: Culture and Cosmos (www.npr.org/13.7) -- on topics ranging from cognitive science to baseball -- and he has been Philosopher-in-Residence with the Forsythe Company (a dance company based in Frankfurt, Germany). Alva Noë is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow.