<p>Sharp-wave ripples (SWR) are central for cognition and hallmark sleep in the rodent hippocampus. Recently, ripple-like activity was also observed in the human hippocampus and neocortex during wakefulness and sleep. However, ripple detection across brain states and cortical regions remains challenging. We demonstrate that putative ripples largely index noise originating from region-, state-, and demand-dependent modulation of cortical background activity. We establish the noise sensitivity for five common detection algorithms across three intracranial EEG studies during sleep and cognitive engagement. On average, 77% of awake ripples in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, reflect false positives within the 1/<i>f</i> ^χ noise floor. We also report task-related 1/<i>f</i> ^χ modulations that lead to spurious ripple activity, and demonstrate scenarios where ripple detections are less impacted by noise. Our results offer a simulation-based approach to estimate the false positive rate and demonstrate the importance of 1/<i>f</i> ^χ activity for state- and context-dependent cortical processing.</p>