A Guide to Emotional Synaesthesia: The Science of Auras

The Aura - a halo of coloured light surrounding a person, whose colours and patterns change according to that persons health, mood, intentions, spiritual condition and so on is a staple of 'New Age' theory. It is a phenomena which people have claimed to have seen for as long as such things have been recorded, and in as many places as such things have been recorded.And as part of the multi-billion dollar new age industry that has sprung up over recent decades there are now a multitude of proffessional aura readers, along with a plethora of books in any average bookstore which suppossedly teach interested candidates how to read auras themselves.

The attitude of the scientific establishment to such things is, of course, that it is just a load of rubbish and that people who claim to be able to see auras are just con artist out to make a quick buck from gullible and naive 'seekers'. It has always been my opinion, however, that the scientific establishment discounts such phenomena far too readily. In such cases a judgement is based solely on the explanation given to said phenomena by its proponents rather than on the phenomena itself. When hippies and occultists talk about spiritual energy, or the light of the soul or whatever their pet theory happens to be then the automatic reaction of the scientist is to dismiss it as religion ro superstition and then not pay the matter a second thought. But just because the vikings thought thunder and lightening where caused by one of their gods striking a hammer in the heavens does not mean that thunder and lightening don't exist, just theat they were wrong about the reasons. I beleive the same is true for many new age phenomena, including auras; and that is why I was fascinated to read of research conducted by Jamie Ward of University College London and reported in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology which suggests that a rare form of synaesthesia could explain the phenomena of auras.