About
I am interested in consciousness. I believe studying perception is a uniquely effective way to approach consciousness in the framework of neuroscience. Even though we cannot empirically observe the contents of perception, we can perform well-defined perceptual manipulations and rigorously measure perceptual outcomes.
My work combines EEG, fMRI, psychophysics, and computational analysis, plus causal manipulations with psychoactive compounds.
Active research areas
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Psychedelic perception
Mapping altered visual experience by combining neuroimaging and behavior with large-scale language analysis of first-person reports.
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Perceptual multistability
How the visual system selects one interpretation of an ambiguous image, and what holds it in place.
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Attention and neural dynamics
EEG studies of how attended and ignored object representations compete and evolve over time.
Selected publications
- Noah, S., Meyyappan, S., Ding, M., & Mangun, G. R. Rhythmic sampling and competition of target and distractor representations in visual sensory memory.
- Bressler, D., Noah, S., Lu, A., & Silver, M. Double dissociation of the effects of volitional control on perceptual selection and maintenance in multistable visual perception.
- Noah, S., Shen, M., Erowid, E., Erowid, F., & Silver, M. A novel method for quantitative analysis of subjective experience reports: application to psychedelic visual experiences.
- Noah, S., & Mangun, G. R. Recent evidence that attention is necessary, but not sufficient, for conscious perception.
Complete list on Google Scholar.
Teaching at Cal Poly
PSY4480: Cognitive Neuroscience.
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Brain Labs
These are interactive demos built for the course. They include tools to navigate a real human brain image (mine, scanned at 0.75 mm) in three planes, unfold the cortex into a flatmap, tour the resting-state networks, and play CogNeurdle, a daily term-recall game built from the course vocabulary. They run entirely in the browser, on laptops and phones, with find-the-structure games for studying.