Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher who works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of "Action in Perception" (The MIT Press, 2004), "Out of Our Heads" (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009 / Piper 2010), and most recently "Varieties of Presence" (Harvard University Press, 2012). He is now at work on a book about art and human nature. Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. In addition, he is philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company. He was born in New York City in 1964.