Auras explained?

[WhiteLion]

I recently read an article in a swedish science magazine where they had studied people at the University London Collage (it think that was the name) that said they saw colours around people and objects.

A theory established from this was ocular-estethics.
Meaning the mind really creates a colour around objects having the person associating with certain objects, people to certain colours, physically seeing them.

An ocular-estethic can see colours eminating from objects, taste colours and sound, feel music etc.

The senses are illusive, creating a seemingly real colour around a word or person, making the estethic believe they can actually see a colour eminating from the person. Hence they think it is a person's aura they're watching.

Have anyone else heard about these studies, theories?

[Zep]

A link or reference would go a long way to progressing this discussion!

[WhiteLion]

A link or reference would go a long way to progressing this discussion!

But I haven't been able to find it online as of yet.

It was an article in the last Illustrated Science magazine, swedish science magazine.

[Camillus]

Is this (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=15148) what you mean?

The article suggests seeing auras is a type of synathaesia.

[Kilik]

http://www.theness.com/pseudo.html#Kirlian%20photography

[Kilik]

http://scenarworld.com/questions.php/
http://scenarworld.com/research/article5.php

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1353653&dopt=Abstract
http://spectrum.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/14/3/149

http://www.diamondhead.net/sbtm.htm
http://www.chiexplorer.com/infrasonic.html

[Perpetual Notion]

I see you're back with your spamming links Kilik.

[richardm]

Originally posted by Camillus
Is this (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=15148) what you mean?

The article suggests seeing auras is a type of synathaesia.

That's quite interesting, actually.

While I still think that the majority of people who think they can see auras are delusional, it's interesting to speculate that a few people who suffered from this could have kicked off the whole craze.

[WhiteLion]

Is this what you mean?

Yes that's the english equivalent of the article it seems.

Thanks Camillus.

[Timothy]

I have had an interest in synesthesia for a number of years, reading up a fair amount on the literature. Just recently, I've begun reading some of the online synesthesia web forums.

There's quite a number of people who relate their experiences of having personality -> color synesthesia, and their frustrations at being labelled as part of the kook crowd whenever they relate their experiences. Many of them are fully aware of the reality of the perceptual phenomenon ... they actually do perceive people to have a color based on their personality ... and are fully aware it has nothing to do with people's "auras" in the new-age sense.

It's the people who have this condition, but *don't* find out that it's an actual neurological phenomenon who then resort to the floofy woo-woo explanation ... and can you blame them? Up until recently, synesthesia was extremely obscure in the realm of general knowledge, and a person who had it could (at his own peril of being labelled crazy) ask hundreds of people about it and come to the conculsion that he and he alone had this "gift". How else would a lay person come to terms with something he *absolutely knew he saw*, but no one else did?

The entire field of synesthesia is incredibly interesting to me. A good introduction is Richard Cytowic's book, "The Man Who Tastes Shapes", and there are quite a number of good web sites available for the Googling.

- Timothy

[Bronze Dog]

One thing I'd like to know: Is it possible for a normal person to make himself temporarily more susceptible to synesthesia? I'm curious what it'd be like to play Rez like that.

For non-gamers: Rez is a fairly simple "rail shooter" for PS2, where you play the role of a hacker breaking into a supercomputer. Think Tron. It plays techno music, and most of your actions generate matching sound effects.

[Timothy]

Originally posted by BronzeDog
One thing I'd like to know: Is it possible for a normal person to make himself temporarily more susceptible to synesthesia? I'm curious what it'd be like to play Rez like that.

Idiopathic synesthesia is apparently present from birth. Acquired synesthesia can be caused by certain drugs and chemical imbalances, most notably LSD.

"No, officer, really! I'm just attempting to acquire synesthesia!"

- Timothy

[Bronze Dog]

Originally posted by Timothy
Idiopathic synesthesia is apparently present from birth. Acquired synesthesia can be caused by certain drugs and chemical imbalances, most notably LSD.

"No, officer, really! I'm just attempting to acquire synesthesia!"

- Timothy
Dang. Guess I'll just have to have some tripper try to describe it to me.

[Garrette]

Interesting. I recently saw a television program about a composer/pianist who tasted music.

Originally posetd by BronzeDog:

One thing I'd like to know: Is it possible for a normal person to make himself temporarily more susceptible to synesthesia? I'm curious what it'd be like to play Rez like that.

Back in my younger, believer days, I saw auras. Actually I still do when I try.

I don't think in my case it relates at all to synaesthesia, but who knows.

For me, I could/can see auras best when the subject was in front of a light or (better) white background, though it wasn't always necessary.

The aura itself was always white and took on the a sort of haloed silhouette of the body. If I concentrated long enough (a key factor, I came to learn later) I would start to get colors, but they would not be solid throughout the aura. Shades of yellow (common) or blue (less common but not rare) or green (less common still) would "undulate" unpredictably throughout the halo.
A friend said she saw red auras, but I never did.

Another clue: I have poor vision at a distance. The auras showed up best when I did not wear my glasses. Even with glasses, they showed up if I squinted just a little and just right.

I can still see them if I try hard enough and take off my glasses, but I never look long enough to get past the pure white stage.

[John Jackson]

There is a type of synaesthesia known as "emotion-colour synaesthesia" and this particular variant may be the reason that some people see auras around others.

Emotion-colour synaesthesia (http://www.news-medical.net/?id=5619)

I believe that some people with epilepsy occasionally see auras too.

Sorry, I don't know enough about it to be a bit more specific.

[Dagny]

Originally posted by richardm
That's quite interesting, actually.

While I still think that the majority of people who think they can see auras are delusional, it's interesting to speculate that a few people who suffered from this could have kicked off the whole craze.

Synesthesia isn't a disorder or a disease; it's simply another form of perception. I have yet to interact with or read about a synesthete who would call their experiences "suffering". Personally, I find it helpful. I can remember peoples names and terms in class because I remember the color first, and then the associated word. I remember dates quickly because of my "time lines". In general, I'm glad I have it and I think most synesthetes would say the same.

[sf108]

Can we ban this link spammer?

[Z]

I wonder if the chemical imbalances of puberty can affect this condition.

From the time I hit puberty until about the middle of my 19th year, I could see something around people. It was usually directly related to what I already knew about them, or what I was picking up from other signals - like, they were happy/sad/crazy, whatever. But it seemed to correspond pretty closely to a lot of color-blind-like conditions I was also experiencing at the time. Even today, I can't discern between similar shades; any dark shade is just 'black', and any really light shade is just 'white'.

Just wondering.

[Kilik]

I don't think it can completely explain away how the concept came to be, because the concept is pervasive in different cultures and schools of thought, and is an ancient idea connected to other ancient traditions and practices. Auras are not really independant ideas seperate from other ancient ideas and practices. But it's an interesting idea, maybe.

And now, through modern science we know that there really are fields and auras around the body and many other things

For example the hearts magnetic field
http://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/soh-images/soh_20_pic.gif

A field of the body trained in ancient times, was very similar to the fields of the earth
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/physical_science/images/dipole_small.gif

[Bronze Dog]

Even though Kilik will ignore me:

Originally posted by Kilik
I don't think it can completely explain away how the concept came to be, because the concept is pervasive in different cultures and schools of thought, and is an ancient idea connected to other ancient traditions and practices. Auras are not really independant ideas seperate from other ancient ideas and practices.
Fallacies: Appeal to Tradition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition), Appeal to Popularity.

And now, through modern science we know that there really are fields and auras around the body and many other things
Which I doubt are relevant to the sorts of auras you talk about.

For example the hearts magnetic field
Never heard about the heart generating a magnetic field. Evidence, please?

A field of the body trained in ancient times, was very similar to the fields of the earth
Again, evidence, please?

[UrsulaV]

While I've experienced synesthesia the artificial way a few times, having talked to a few synesthetes, I get this feeling that it doesn't actually work out to the same thing. Unfortunately, here we run into a coupla problems--A) we're all locked up in our respective skulls, and can't compare subjective realities all that well, and B) there isn't a terribly good vocabulary available for this sort of thing.

But anyway, synesthesia on LSD was about what you'd expect--I'd listen to "Dark Side of the Moon"* or to people talk or whatever and various musical or verbal phrases would turn into a kind of hallucinatory visual, generally on the ceiling or somewhere in back of your eyes, usually totally unrelated to the topic at hand. An individual word or a musical chord might be a red, spiky arrow, or a band of squares doing the moire pattern jitter. (See, my descriptive vocabulary's totally falling down on the job here.) Or, for the really dramatic occurances, you'd pluck a note on a guitar string and it'd be purple--it'd glow purple, you'd SEE purple run over your hands, and eventually fade once the note faded. Or the cat would start purring, and her purr would cycle through orange and purple-brown and kind of crackle through her fur. A fun way to kill twelve hours if you don't have class the next day, mind you.

And then you get a synesthete trying to explain, in frustration, that "G" is red, it's always red, and it smells like nail polish, and trying to color the letter G blue is like trying to lick your own elbow. And the number three is male and kind of a jerk. And months are long spirally sheets of pages going backwards. And they realize this sounds weird. (The number thing I get, actually, I always assigned personality to numbers, but the rest is another world.)

This sort of anecdote is of course useless for proving the similiarity or difference of the experiences of synesthesia--presumably one would need to hook electrodes up to the brain or at least develop a much better vocabulary for this sort of thing. But anyway, to finally get, in a roundabout fashion, to my point--I don't think drug induced synesthesia is much use, as an experience, to understand actual synesthesia (although a lot could probably be learned about related brain chemistry and whatnot if you did it in a lab) I've done it, and I can still only vaguely grasp what somebody living with the real kind is like. Living with it, and taking it for granted, seems to be a whole 'nother ball game.



*this is required by law for all college drug experiences

[ReFLeX]

That magnetic field looks like every other basic magnetic field I've ever seen. Try iron filings on a flat surface and a bar magnet. The supposed heart's magnetic field, however, not only doesn't look similar but also can't exist without a substantial amount of either iron, nickel or cobalt in the heart. Unless you're not talking about ferromagnetism... in which case, what are you talking about?

ETA: Ok, now that I look at it differently, both diagrams show the same magnetic field. Nothing significant about that, however.

[Kilik]

"Fallacies: Appeal to Tradition, Appeal to Popularity."

I wasn't saying that proves the exsistence of arua. But that Aura's are part of a large philosophy, rather than an independant concept. So it has now been integrated into various schools of thought. So I think it is a bit more complicated than just someone with synthasia started the whole thing. I think it's an interesting idea, but not enough to
fully explain how the idea came about

"Which I doubt are relevant to the sorts of auras you talk about."

I don't know about that, because some are almost identical to the fields of the earth . Well, the way they're often drawn anyways

"Never heard about the heart generating a magnetic field. Evidence, please?"

Here's an article wchich mentions it
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15823696&query_hl=3
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1395186&dopt=Abstract

I've read on several site, that the magnetic field of the heart has been discovered to be the strongest of the body, stronger than the brain

http://www.heartmath.org/research/research-intuition/The_Resonant_Heart.pdf

Again, evidence, please?

http://wongkk.com/chikung/lohan.html
http://wongkk.com/images/chikung/lohan01.jpg

http://media1.minghui.org/media/dafa/en_mpg/Instruction.ram

http://www.qiqigong.com/

The ancients connected the bodies field to the earth's field because facing south along a north/south axsis is the preferred direction

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Kilik
I don't know about that, because some are almost identical to the fields of the earth . Well, the way they're often drawn anyways.Even if they existed and were the same as the earth's, that wouldn't mean a thing.
Here's an article wchich mentions itThose aren't articles, they're previews of actual studies. There's no way to examine the actual methodology and data from that.
I've read on several site, that the magnetic field of the heart has been discovered to be the strongest of the body, stronger than the brain
http://www.heartmath.org/research/research-intuition/The_Resonant_Heart.pdf

The Institute of HeartMath is listed on quackwatch.org as a questionable organization (not surprising considering its assertions):

http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecorg.html

I suggest reading his nine precautionary questions to see how you might better separate the nonsense from the legitimate scientific organizations.

The ancients connected the bodies field to the earth's field because facing south along a north/south axsis is the preferred direction Supposing the heart were a little magnet, there would be no guarantee that every person's heart was oriented in the same direction, not to mention its relatively small size would make it near impossible to "face south". The ancients did innumerable things that were completely useless, with no supporting evidence, just like those chinese addresses you cite. You should realize that type of mysticism has no credibility on a skeptic board.

[Kilik]

The main point was that the same type of ideas are shown on many independant sites, whether ancient or modern.

Not necessarilty to do an in depth analysis of a certain study or data at this point

And also, ancient issues are relevant to the discussion of auras

[Bronze Dog]

Originally posted by Kilik
The main point was that the same type of ideas are shown on many independant sites, whether ancient or modern.
Not much of a point to making that point, as far as I can see.

And also, ancient issues are relevant to the discussion of auras
Assuming auras of the sort you talk about actually exist.

[Dredred]

Originally posted by Kilik
So I think it is a bit more complicated than just someone with synthasia started the whole thing. I think it's an interesting idea, but not enough to fully explain how the idea came about


Why do you think one person started the whole thing? It's not a condition that only one person ever had. Why doesn't emotion-colour synaesthesia fully explain the origin of the idea of auras? It sounds like a plausible explanation to me.

[MountainJack]

Originally posted by BronzeDog
Never heard about the heart generating a magnetic field. Evidence, please?


Well, we know from observing EKGs that the heart muscle generates a varying electrical field, one that repeats cyclically every heartbeat. And that's why pacemakers work, they add their own electrical pulse to augment that of a heart that isn't putting out the proper electrical pulse(s).

And physics tells us that a varying electric field generates a varying magnetic field, so that must be generated by the heart also.

But these fields are cyclical, and therefore quite different from the static field produced by a bar magnet, or the earth, which acts like a big bar magnet. I doubt that the earth's magnetic field or that of a bar magnet has any impact on the heart's field, although a controlled experiment could convince me otherwise if done properly. I just never heard of such an experiment showing such an effect.

As far as auras go, I see jagged auras before getting migranes. Scintillating scotomas, they call them. Doesn't go away when you close your eyes. Epileptics are supposed to see them too before an attack. But I never saw an aura surrounding a person or object.

[Dagny]

Originally posted by MountainJack
Epileptics are supposed to see them too before an attack.

I didn't know that. Any clue as to whether it's specific to certain types of epilepsy? Are there any good references you have for this subject (technical or otherwise)?

[Nucular]

Originally posted by MountainJack
Epileptics are supposed to see them too before an attack.I think the epileptic "aura" is something different: people with epilepsy quite often get subtle feelings that presage the onset of a fit; this can be various things, a dizziness, a feeling of surreality, a strange taste, a subtle shift in attention, a buzzing sound - but it's known as the 'aura', as far as I am aware unrelated to our magic invisible coats.

[Nucular]

Originally posted by BronzeDog
Dang. Guess I'll just have to have some tripper try to describe it to me. "I can see the taste! I can see the taste! I can taste it in the air in front of me!"

Is about as eloquent as I got.

Synaesthesia is a peculiar thing, but I doubt it explains the vast majority of people claiming to see auras - wishful thinking, group conformity, etc. are better explanations I think.

I used to see 'auras' - it took me a while to work out what they were, as they were pretty much what I expected an aura to be like. I would stare at a person, really stare, and after a while a light shape would form around them, and would become more pronounced when I concentrated on it. At first it would just look white, but after a while you could sometimes discern faint colours.

The explanation? It was just the negative after-image of the person. You stare for long enough at something, and you get an after-image, in the opposite colours. When you start to move your attention to the edges of that object, your eyes move ever so slightly, and the after-image seems to surround the object.

[Floating Egg]

I used to see 'auras' - it took me a while to work out what they were, as they were pretty much what I expected an aura to be like. I would stare at a person, really stare, and after a while a light shape would form around them, and would become more pronounced when I concentrated on it. At first it would just look white, but after a while you could sometimes discern faint colours.

The explanation? It was just the negative after-image of the person. You stare for long enough at something, and you get an after-image, in the opposite colours. When you start to move your attention to the edges of that object, your eyes move ever so slightly, and the after-image seems to surround the object.

That's interesting and it makes sense. Does this also explain why the aura will take on the color of the background that a person is standing against? For example, I'll see green auras if someone is standing against a green background.

[gecko]

hello!

this is very interesting. Awhile back I used to believe heavily in auras and train my peripheral vision to zone out, and in time I started to really see colors around people. The thing is, the colors aren't logical. I understand that a dark blue has a yellow light around it, and everything of that nature. Because of opposite colors I think? But the colors on people, that is something weird. Someone with brown hair can have a turquoise or a yellow aura...also my black cat had a very strong red light around it one day.

Auras are what I have always defined the light I can see as, but I would be interested in looking at some alternative examples. I guess I can't expect everyone to believe that I can see these colors...but it really is a true thing. :P I'm not saying that it is some type of "aura" necessarily, though I have tried to say such in the past for those of you who have read my posts. But very interesting...I'll have to look into this.

EDIT: oh, this says that it is just a rare condition, not a learned one? Hm, now I suddenly don't believe it, since this wasn't something I could always see. I am going to link you all to a site, I doubt anyone will really do this, but if you really want to understand the issue further this would be a really really really great way to explore right?

http://www.thiaoouba.com/seeau.htm

Go to the bottom and click "our eyes", then go through the exercises. Keep at these just a few minutes a day for a few weeks...I know it is boring and annoying and you'll probably wonder why you're doing it, but this could be a really great way to further understand the issue. Honestly. Just trust me everyone, all right? I'm not some crazy...I don't think. Hehe.

Anyway, see if you can see the light around the circles, and with time around people. It would be really cool if people actually did this and reported the colors they can see around people, or if you guys all did this and said you couldn't see them even after weeks, well then that would make it being a "rare" thing more likely. But I can say that this was a kick my brother and I went on, and we could both see them really well for a time. Even now I kind of can, on some rare occassions...but without doing these exercise thingies I started to lose the sight.

I don't really feel like debating this...just something to think about. I'll be going now, thank you for whoever read through all this! :)