Alva Noë

Theo Jansen, the artist, writes on his website that he is occupied with creating new forms of life:

Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, ...

Humans dance. And we love to talk. If Aniruddh D. Patel, a neuroscientist at Tufts university, is right, there is a deep link between dancing and speech.

Humans are the only primate who can dance. Even our nearest relatives — monkeys, chimps, bonobos — can't manage to synchronize their ...

Doping in sports is back in the news and you don't need to be a sports fan to have heard about it. The PBS Newshour devoted a segment to the recent disclosure that Tyson Gay, America's top sprinter and self-declared Mr. Clean, had failed a drug test. And then ...

If Bugs Bunny had a pitch, it would be the knuckleball. It weaves and bobs, zigs and zags, and acts like it has a mind of its own. Catchers have trouble catching this pitch. It leaves hitters dazed. Even the pitcher can't really say for sure what it's going to ...

In Thursday's New York Times there's an article on keeping a score card by hand at baseball games. Who does it anymore? Fewer and fewer people, according to the article. Why bother when you can enjoy a live play-by-play on your handheld device? And if you insist on keeping ...

I saw Man of Steel last week — the latest retelling of the Superman story — and I was thrilled to see that now, finally, an effort has been made to make better sense of Superman's X-ray vision.

Surgeons have been performing cataract operations on the blind for centuries ...

My dad sent me link to the video below several months ago.

Since then, Illusion Chasers Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik have singled it out for attention on their Scientific American blog.

As they notice, it is amusingly difficult to see what's going on here, even though it ...

I think we're starting to see some sort of conflict between law and values, on the one hand, and technology, on the other. The conflict is unfolding in connection with the law surrounding privacy and protection from undue government and corporate surveillance.

I'm not exactly sure why people are so ...

This text is adapted from Alva's book Out of Our Heads.

Who, or what, is conscious? How can we decide? Where in nature do we find consciousness? This can seem like the hardest problem in this whole field: the question of the consciousness of others. I am ...

Two things jumped out at me when I visited the show "Encyclopedic Palace" at the Central Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale. The first is that in a show that claims, according to the wall text, to "initiate an inquiry into the many ways in which images ...

This is coming to you from Venice, where I am attending the opening of the Art Biennale.

I find myself interested in Tino Sehgal's live piece installed in one of the main galleries of the Giardini. If the piece has a title, it isn't posted anywhere. I ...

In The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond offers a clever — if speculative — theory of the origins of race. After first dismissing the idea that racial differences are functional adaptations to different climates, he proposes that the tendency for certain people to look alike in respect of facial features, ...

At my son's music recital last week, the 4th-graders performed a hand-clapping, footstomping version of Queen's "We will rock you."

It was marvelous, but very odd, to hear these children sing out the words:

Buddy you're a boy make a big noise

Playin' in the street gonna be ...

There are two excellent ideas at the heart of art historian Benjamin Binstock's beautiful and strange new book Vermeer's Family Secrets. The first is taken from a Nietzsche quote:

"We have learned to love all things that we now love."

The second is that you can't recognize a painting ...

In fall 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford, and Peter Norvig, the top scientist at Google, teamed up to develop and teach a free, online course on artificial intelligence. Their aim, as Norvig said in an impassioned and compelling TED talk, was to develop a course at ...

A comment I heard more than once at a recent event in New York to celebrate the life of Oliver Sacks, who turns 80 this year, is that it isn't Sacks' patients who are particularly interesting; it is the interest that Sacks brings to them that makes them ...

For some not inconsiderable portion of the population, life reorganizes itself each spring with the start of the baseball season. Until now, my role in the baseball eco-system has been clear. I am a fan. I watch baseball, and I think about it. A lot. My ex-wife once referred to ...

A few years back, I attended a Keith Jarrett solo piano recital at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. The hall, which seats nearly 3,000 people, was sold out.

The first time an audience member coughed, Jarrett stopped playing and commented on the excellent timing of the cough. As others ...

The other day I heard a remarkable conversation between Lawrence Weschler, the journalist and author, and Bob Garfield, host of WNYC's On the Media. The topic was accuracy and honesty, truth and fiction, in reporting. Weschler remarked that when he was working on a story, he never recorded ...

Neurology is the branch of medicine concerned with the health of the brain and nervous system. If you've spent time in the office of a neurologist, you'll have noticed that there is something quaintly old-world about the practice.

Neurologists ask a lot of questions; they listen; then they hook you ...