Auras

Posted on May 14, 2008 | 10 Comments

auraSome people claim to see auras – halos of colour – around people. Other’s don’t believe them.

Many believers in auras attribute the to supernatural forces, “leaky Chakras” or “pure life force” emanating from living beings. Non-believers will sometimes ridicule these explanations and point to the complete absence of evidence for such “energy fields” or life forces.

I think these arguments are often dogmatic and actually unscientific. There may be no evidence of energy fields etc., but that does not mean that auras don’t exist, or that those who claim to see them are lying or deluded. It is dogmatic to deny a phenomenon just because we can’t explain it with current knowledge. We can’t make scientific progress with that attitude.

On the other hand the existence of a phenomenon without any current rational explanation is not evidence for the supernatural. These arguments are also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge because they rely on untestable explanations. Just imagine where we would be if we still thought that thunder and lightning was caused by the anger of gods!

Of course, things like auras can be investigated scientifically. Sandra and Mathew Blakeslee describe such investigations in their book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better.

They relate how a women who genuinely sees auras was investigated and found to have emotion-colour synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition where awareness in one sense produces a response in another sense because of overlapping mind maps. Numbers have colours. Tastes have shapes. Sounds have a visual effect. This women reported colours associated with people and their names – presumably because of her emotional reaction to individuals.

So, it could be that some people really do see auras and these could be a natural construction of parts of their brain.

Now, we couldn’t make that advancement in understanding by taking up a dogmatic position. By claiming that auras don’t exist because they don’t fit in with current knowledge. Or by claiming that they do exist but have a supernatural or paranormal explanation.

By the way, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own is well worth reading. It’s a fascinating and fast moving area of science.

See also:
Brain Podcast Interview with Sarah Blakeslee about The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.
Brain Science Podcast #21: Body Maps: Dr Ginger Campbell discusses The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.

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10 Responses to Auras

  1. docartemis | May 14, 2008 at 2:41 am |

    Excellent discussion!

    Ginger Campbell, MD
    Brain Science Podcast

    Thanks for the links!

  2. AshTray900 | May 14, 2008 at 6:04 am |

    Thats an interesting way to look at it, wonder if something like this could be induced by psychoactive drugs like LSD? Still unsure of the validity of such claims though, as a skeptic I constantly find that people who claim such things like this phenomenon are evidence of the supernatural it is very hard to even take their claim at face value, many people argue just for the sake of prooving that supernatural forces exist, and when we look at the physical evidence it all points to the likelyhood that they are just in a dellusional state and no such underlying phenomenon exists outside of their unstopping need to validate their own supernatural worldview. Do we have any testimony of persons who do not have any beleif in the supernatural claiming to see such things? someone who would fit in the category of skeptic/rationalist/atheist etc that claims to see emotion as color in the visual part of the brain without making any supernatural claims and assuming that their is a completely logical causation behind it? This explanation is very good if such a phenomenon is in fact real, and we allready know of instances where our brain pathways can leak signals into other areas not necessarily intended to do so by brain development through the effects that overabundance of neurotransmitters in the brain can have.

  3. Ken | May 19, 2008 at 3:28 pm |

    AshTray900, I think the book made the point that the women who saw auras wasn’t promoting any supernatural explanation. It was just apart of her experience and she thought everyone else did either.

    However, I agree that many people who claim experiencing such phenomena do promote supernatural explanations. I think that’s dishonest. If we experience something then it should be open to enquiry. Claiming it to be “supernatural” is to advance magical explanations (without real evidence) and ruling scientific approaches out. Always arrogant in my eyes.

  4. Java | May 26, 2008 at 1:57 pm |

    I am an atheist and also a skeptic of anything “supernatural” or “paranormal”.

    I don’t maintain that something can’t exist if I can’t see it, I am just more inclined to question it.

    I have certain frequent dreams. The latest being a dream seeing my brother, who I am very close to, laying in a hospital bed, wrapped in bandages and hooked up to an IV. That was the entire short dream, just a visual blip.

    My mother called the next day to tell me that my brother had been thrown from a horse and was in the hospital, having required surgery. I have many examples of such types of dreams.

    I’ve had people throw the words “supernatural” and “paranormal” at me in order to slap a label on those kinds of dreams, but I’m not buying it.

    I don’t consider them to be supernatural. They just are. And they always come true within a day or two following the dream. My mother had them, my grandmother had them. Genetics? Who knows.

    There are some things that just haven’t, yet, been fully explained by science. But I figure they will be, eventually.

  5. Ken | May 26, 2008 at 3:51 pm |

    I wonder if predictive dreams are common. I seem to have dreamed things about my children before birth (e.g. the sex of my first child) and even started to think that perhaps the dreams were predictive.

    However, this assertion came back to embarrass me once after I claimed I had dreamed about a specific job one of my sons had got. It turns out that he had actually rang and told me of the job while I was half asleep because of some medication I had taken. It sure seemed like a dream to me.

    I agree that one shouldn’t be dogmatic about these things – either in denying possibilities or claiming supernatural explanations. It’s better to say we don’t know (but let’s find out).

  6. Java | May 27, 2008 at 4:27 am |

    I have occasional attacks of “exploding head syndrome”, lol. EHS, for short. It’s a real diagnosis, there’s a few articles about it around the net.

    Anyway, before it had a name and some potential causes pinpointed, many people of the supernatural bent had decided that EHS was a sign that one was experiencing astral projection. The “bang” would supposedly occur as one was leaving or re-entering the body.

    Those in the supernatural community will attempt to convince you that you are “special” and “different” and have “powers” and are offended when you don’t accept their explanation.

    It’s only been since the late 80′s that EHS has come under study by physicians and a cause hasn’t fully been determined yet.

    I thought it was interesting that EHS seems a good recent example of science slowly getting a handle on something that has always been labeled as “unknown” or “supernatural”.

  7. Damian | May 27, 2008 at 8:08 am |

    Memory can be a tricky thing too. The next time you have a premonition write it down and date it. That way you’ll be sure that you’re not accidentally retrodicting (merging current memories with past ones – it happens sometimes) and you’ll also be able to get an accurate idea of the hit ratio if you are having genuine premonitions.

  8. Ken | May 27, 2008 at 4:19 pm |

    EHS sounds a little bit like “electric jolts” – one of the symptoms of prozac withdrawal.

    I get something like that which I attribute to Menier’s syndrome – a problem resulting from damage to the inner ear effecting balance and also producing vertigo symptoms.

    Amazing thing about the brain, though, is that it can learn to adjust to such things.

  9. Java | May 28, 2008 at 6:34 am |

    Never been on Prozac, I really think it has something to do with the inner ear. But it also happens more frequently when under stress. It doesn’t happen enough to worry about it or take meds for it, though.

    I have several people in my family with Menier’s.

  10. redqueengenesis | July 14, 2008 at 7:32 pm |

    Thank you so much for posting those links! I am very curious to read them! To add to the previous discussion I don’t think much of anything is ‘super’natural because when I think about it it seems only perfectly natural. I love science as well as spirituality, and I was torn for a long time as to who was right… if that makes any sense? I’ve come to the realization that they are both right and my background in science helps me logically (even if I can’t do the experiments to prove it) explain phenomena for myself. I am interested to read more of your blog so I will be subscribing!

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