Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 26, 2026

Training Synesthetic Letter-color Associations by Reading in Color
Published on: February 20, 2014
Auras in mysticism and synaesthesia: a comparison
E G Milán1, O Iborra, M Hochel
1Departamento de Psicología Experimental, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain. egomez@ugr.es
Abstract:
In a variety of synaesthesia, photisms result from affect-laden stimuli as emotional words, or faces of familiar people. For R, who participated in this study, the sight of a familiar person triggers a mental image of "a human silhouette filled with colour". Subjective descriptions of synaesthetic experiences induced by the visual perception of people's figures and faces show similarities with the reports of those who claim to possess the ability to see the aura. It has been proposed that the purported auric perception may be easily explained by the presence of a specific subtype of cross-modal perception. We analyse the subjective reports of four synaesthetes who experience colours in response to human faces and figures. These reports are compared with descriptions of alleged auric phenomena found in the literature and with claims made by experts in esoteric spheres. The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar.
Related Concept Videos
Synesthesia
Extrasensory Perception
Precognition involves foreseeing future events, such as predicting an accident before it happens. An example of precognition could be someone dreaming about a specific event, like a car crash, which then occurs...
Altered States of Awareness
The ingestion of substances like stimulants or hallucinogens leads to chemical alterations in the brain that...
Magical Thinking
Auditory Perception
Colors and Magnetism
When atoms or molecules absorb light at the proper frequency, their electrons are excited to higher-energy orbitals. For many main group atoms and molecules, the absorbed photons are in the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum, which cannot be detected by the human eye. For coordination compounds, the energy difference between the d orbitals often allows photons in the visible range to be absorbed and emitted, which is seen as colors by the human eye.

