Aura
From SkepticWiki
[edit] Definition
An aura is an emenation of light, usually colored, surrounding the bodies of people and sometimes of animals, and visible, obviously, only to a gifted few. People who claim to be able to see auras sometimes claim that the color or other features of the aura (such as its extent from the body) can be used to help diagnose mood, personality, health problems, etc, in the person emitting the aura.
[edit] Discussion
We have spoken to a number of people who have claimed to see auras and who do not make any money out of their claim; we are inclined to think them sincere, and to suppose that they are indeed having the visual experience which they are describing. The question then arises as to whether these auras are real things which most of us can’t see, or whether they are examples of synaesthesia [1], as with people who report that they see colors associated with sounds. Certainly such accounts seem consistent with the clinical description of synaesthesia [2] : one stimulus always evokes a certain perception; the perception occurs involuntarily; the perceptions are individual: every Synaesthete has their "own" colors and shapes; the perceptions are irreversible: (e.g. a 7 might evoke the color blue, but the color blue doesn't evoke a 7); the perceptions are permanent: they begin at child age and don't change throughout life. The individuality of the perceptions is a particular point to note: whereas one person who sees auras reports that they are mostly purple or blue, another will see mostly yellow auras. This lack of consistency argues that the aura is a private psychological phenomenon.
It is not difficult to put claims of the reality of auras to the test. Since the aura supposedly extends beyond the body, if you place a man behind a screen in such a way that his aura extends beyond it, his presence will be visible to people who can see auras --- if auras are more than a mental artifact. If you take, say, twenty screens and ten men to stand behind them, positioned at random, and see if the seer of auras can locate the men, then you have a test of whether the aura is a real thing, or something added to the scene, consciously or unconsciously, by the seer of auras. Anyone who can successfully demonstrate the reality of auras by demonstrating this talent is certainly eligible for the Million Dollar Prize. Claims to diagnose health problems from the aura are almost equally simple to test.
There are various people and websites professing to teach you to see auras. The experience these techniques provide are not like those described by the people who claim to see auras naturally: in particular, these methods work for any colored shape, with or without a psyche, and produce results which are predictable given the color of the shape. A look at such a site [3] shows that all that these people have stumbled on is a fairly unimpressive variation on an optical illusion involving complementary colors. For a much better version of this illusion, which does not depend on the poverty of your peripheral vision, see this site.
