Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

Alva Noë is one of a new breed — part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist — who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. In his own words:

What prevents us from explaining how consciousness arises in the brain is staring us in the face: consciousness doesn't arise in the brain. Consciousness isn't something that happens inside us, like digestion. It is something we do or make. Better yet, it is something we achieve. Consciousness is more like dancing than it is digestive processes.

"Noë turns Descartes's famous statement on its head: I am, therefore I think, says Noë. The author, a philosopher at UC-Berkeley, challenges the assumptions underlying neuroscientific studies of consciousness, rejecting popular mechanistic theories that our experience of the world stems from the firing of the neurons in our brains. Noë (Action in Perception) argues that we are not our brains, that consciousness arises from interactions with our surroundings: 'Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make.' Noë points out that many of our habits, like language, are 'foundational' aspects of our mental experience, but at the same time many, if not most, habits are environmental in nature — we behave a particular way in a particular situation. He goes on to challenge popular theories of perception, in particular the claim that the world is just a grand illusion conjured up by the brain. Readers interested in how science can intersect with and profit from philosophy will find much food for thought in Noë's groundbreaking study." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His previous book, Action in Perception, was published in 2004.