For some people, glowing visions of light emanating from a person’s body are, at the very least, real. That is the interesting conclusion of a study on a new form of emotion-color synesthesia that manifests as colored auras.
Aura and synesthesia
Synesthesia is the cooperation of senses. Other forms of synesthesia include numbers and letters that evoke colors, touches that evoke emotions and colors with their own smells. Now Vilayanur Ramachandran and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, have identified a new type of synesthesia in a man whose emotions gave rise to seeing colors, which came in the form of auras around other people.
The man in question, anonymously named RF, is a 23-year-old man who has a mild form of autism called Asperger's syndrome. At the age of 10, his mother taught him to connect his emotions to colors so he could more easily talk about his feelings. After a while, he soon reported that when he felt different emotions he actually saw the colors in his head.
This developed over several years until he described beginning to see an "aura of color" around other people depending on the emotion he associated with them. He says everyone's aura is blue to begin with, and changes once it associates with a particular emotion.
To test this seemingly self-induced synesthesia of RF, Ramachandran's team placed a female volunteer against a white background. She drew an outline too around her body with a black pen. Surprisingly, RF reported that the volunteer's aura filled the space from her body to the line, no matter how far away from the body the line was drawn.
The team then projected blue or orange letters on the white background at various points around the volunteer, either inside or outside the black line. They asked RF to indicate what the letter was while measuring his reaction. When the letter was blue and inside the black line, RF was twice as slow as he was at any other position.
Luke Miller, who presented the study at the Society for Neuroscience, said the blue letters projected within the black line are likely to be merged with the blue aura making them harder to recognize than those outside the line or colored orange.
"Some people who claim they can see auras may have this form of synesthesia," says Elizabeth Seckel, who also collaborated on the project. They can empathize well with someone else' s emotions and project this onto the person as a colored aura, adds Miller.
Miller has yet to test whether this is so. The team hopes to use MRI scans next time to find out which areas of the brain may be responsible for the illusion and whether it is an illusion. In any case, it is an interesting phenomenon.
Source: New Scientist
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