Natural explanations for aura-sensing abilities
Can she actually see your aura, or is it just in her head?
My ex said that she could see people’s auras and I dismissed it as some kind of weird spiritual thing. I’m practically a materialist, so I thought she could be imagining it. If you search “can people see auras,” you’ll find information like this:
Though no scientific studies exist to prove the existence of auras, many practices and philosophies do believe that they are real. However, the interpretation of what an aura actually is may vary among practices and philosophies.
However, auras aren’t just some New Age spiritual thing. Religious iconography from all over the world have depicted holy people and gods as having halos:
Before I go on, I have to admit my bias. I had a child with my ex, and (for better or worse) this can influence my approach and interpretations.
I’m going to discuss a few ways in which auras might arise from completely natural causes:
It’s synesthesia. Some assign colors to sounds, numbers, etc. Why not assign colors and patterns to people?
She’s able to see into the IR spectrum or the UV spectrum.
It’s chromatic aberration.
She says she sees different colored auras from different people. She says she’s seen blue or green auras. And she’s started noticing this after she’s started working as massage therapist.
Why am I looking into this now?
As I read about the new James Webb telescope, and this line caught my eye:
By detecting infrared light, JWST could see the heated upper atmosphere shining; it appears as a red ring around the planet.
She mentioned her ability to see auras a couple weeks ago. It’s weird. Can she actually see auras? If she could, that would be huge. It didn’t seem too outlandish the last time she brought it up. I hypothesized that it might be synesthesia.
Hypothesis 1: Synesthesia
Visual processing is involved in somewhere between 20% and 60% of the human brain. On some level, we have no clue how much of the brain does visual processing, but we know it’s a big portion. It’s not too surprising that numbers and sounds get color coded. Why couldn’t people get color coded? If you care a lot about numbers, you might recruit this big visual processing workhorse to do some number crunching for you. If you care about relationships, could this mean you would see auras?
According to Wikipedia:
However, a 2012 study discovered no link between auras and synaesthesia
And a quote in the same Wikipedia article from Steven Novella:
Given the weight of the evidence it seems that the connection between auras and synaesthesia is speculative and based on superficial similarities that are likely coincidental.
Note the word “likely”. That’s the thing with science. We can’t prove a negative. We can’t prove auras are made up. The best we can do is document all the ways in which we’ve tried and failed to find natural explanations. Maybe someone will come along and find an explanation that fits.
For context, the idea that the earth revolved around the sun existed for a long time (over a thousand years) before it gathered enough evidence to spark the Copernican Revolution.
Hypothesis 2: Shifted sensitivity of the L cone
After reading about the James Webb telescope, another thought struck me: maybe she has IR vision?
I’ve studied color and human vision in a good deal of depth, and wrote software that takes advantage of human color perception. I also wrote software to help determine the composition of stars by analyzing their spectra. I know enough about how ordinary human vision works that I can hypothesize what might happen in extraordinary situations.
The reason for looking at IR at all is that if you can perceive colors outside the normal visual spectrum, you’ve only got a couple directions. The thing that gives photons their color is that some photons have short wavelengths, and others (like infrared) have long wavelengths. In the end, it’s still photons. Humans can normally perceive a certain range (380 to 740nm). So if someone is able to see things other people can’t see, it’s natural to ask if their window is wider than normal. Younger people can hear higher pitched noises. Why couldn’t the same happen for vision?
One hypothesis is that she’s able to detect infrared light somehow. There’s two ways it could happen: shifted sensitivity of the red cone, or a 4th cone type.
The thinking would be that instead of the L cone (responsible for perceiving red light) being most sensitive around 680nm, maybe the sensitivity curve was wider, or shifted into the infrared range.
Still, if she’s seeing infrared, it is weird that it would show up as green or blue.
I googled, “can humans see infrared”, and imagine my surprise when one of the first results had this line:
The new study was initiated after the scientists reported seeing occasional flashes of green light while working with an infrared laser. [emphasis mine]
We’re seeing green from infrared light? I might be onto something. You might think humans don’t emit light — it sounds ridiculous since we’re not light bulbs, but we do. Our bodies emit infrared light. Some animals rely on infrared to catch their prey at night. It’s not totally unheard of.
In any case, a further reading of how the scientists saw the green flashes led me to believe it’s unlikely that the mechanism is the same:
…packing a lot of photons in a short pulse of the rapidly pulsing laser light makes it possible for two photons to be absorbed at one time by a single photopigment, and the combined energy of the two light particles is enough to activate the pigment and allow the eye to see what normally is invisible.
Another problem with IR vision is you’d expect people who see auras around people to see these same auras around engines. It would be a hard thing to miss.
There’s a study that shows people are able to perceive infrared light as a faint red glow. This doesn’t sound close enough to auras.
To sum up, I don’t think she has an L cone that can perceive IR radiation.
Hypothesis 2B: She has a 4th type of cone
It’s not unheard of — and women are more likely to have this than men. However, Snopes doesn’t it make me think it’s likely the case here:
Neitz told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette in 2006 that only about 2% of the female population are tetrachromats. Newcastle University neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan said that the number may be higher (about 12%), but in twenty years of research she has only been able to confirm the condition in one person: “We now know tetrachromacy exists. But we don’t know what allows someone to become functionally tetrachromatic, when most four-coned women aren’t.”
This hypothesis is related to my other infrared vision hypothesis, but it offers a more compelling explanation for the blur. The blur would be caused by the fact that she likely only has a small number of these special infrared sensing cones (which could in be sensitive at a ranger much further out than the normal L cones). The low number of them would cause the image from them to be very blurry, and therefore create an aura effect. For example, look at this low resolution infrared image with edges from the visual spectrum overlayed on top (MSX on):
Is it possible that infrared activation can be turned on and off by choice? This may seem absurd, but it’s not inconceivable. If the light coming from these cones gets remapped onto colors that are within the visible spectrum, then such cones might impair her ability to accurately judge color. Imagine a green or blue filter added over any warm object. This would be hurt color perception in most cases.
Your eyes do have “modes”, depending on how you look at it. At night, your eyes depend more on the monochromatic rods in the periphery of your vision. You do have two vision modes at your disposal, but the difference here is night vision is more automatic (and not a conscious choice).
But it’s also possible that you can focus on the infrared part of your vision just as you can mentally focus on being aware of the periphery of your visual field. Or it could work like your ears do when you’re focusing between one conversation or another at a dinner party. Technically, you hear everyone’s conversations. Practically, you can only focus on one conversation at any time. This would mean that the auras would be practically invisible unless you pay attention to them. IR perception might even be weakened for most women from disuse.
I can think of a few evolutionary benefits to IR vision:
Night vision, duh!
Seeing better through haze
Sensing someone’s presence
Hypothesis 3: Chromatic aberration
Chromatic aberration is naturally colorful — it would explain why different people have different colored auras. This aberration would affect everything, and not just living things, or hot things.
However it would explain why different people might have different auras: this would depend on the skin color of the person she’s looking at and the color of the background. Chromatic aberration is a well-known optical phenomenon, and is impossible to ignore. It’s also something your optometrist would be able to catch. It’s effectively a more subtle version of refraction, which has been studied to death since Isaac Newton.
You can get a blue glow, but it would be small, and only visible on the edges. Here’s an image taken with a lens that enhances the chromatic aberration (notice the blue glow):
If auras came from chromatic aberration, I’m pretty sure we would have found out by now.
Conclusion
The most convincing explanation to me is still synesthesia. If it was IR, I can think of a few ways to test this. What about UV light? I haven’t looked into possible mechanisms and their ramifications. In all, it would be exciting if people could see auras.