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What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports

Published on: 2025-07-15 19:27:30

The existence of synesthesia blew Sean Noah’s mind the first time he learned about it in high school biology class. He found it fascinating that, for synesthetes, sounds could generate images, and that some drugs, including psychedelics, could elicit that effect in people who don’t usually experience synesthesia. What did that mean about how our brains process the senses? This question led Noah to study psychology and neuroscience as an undergrad at UC Berkeley. After receiving a doctorate in psychology from University of California at Davis, where he studied the relationship between attention and visual perception. Noah recently returned to UC Berkeley for a postdoctoral fellowship, where he’s studying psychedelics to better understand how the drugs affect visual perception. He began a research project with the website Erowid, a repository of some 60,000 pages of information about psychoactive plants and chemicals. Together with the website’s founders, Fire and Earth Erowid, Noah is ... Read full article.