Afterimages and visual effects
Staring at a person against a plain background produces edge effects and colour afterimages.
Tested, never passed
Aura reading
Aura reading is the claimed ability of seeing a coloured field around a person and reading it. Status: tested, never passed.
What people describe
Aura readers describe seeing or sensing a coloured field around people, with colours linked to mood, health or personality — blue for calm, red for energy, muddy colours for illness or distress.
How it entered the record
The London physician Walter Kilner published "The Human Atmosphere" in 1911, describing coloured screens he believed made the aura visible. In 1939 Semyon Kirlian discovered a photographic technique that shows glowing halos around objects; it records corona discharge, which changes with moisture and pressure rather than emotion.
The experiment
Controlled tests of aura readers; separately, our own check against physics
How it was run
The reader stands before a screen with several partitions and says behind which one a person is standing — if an aura extends beyond the body, it is visible over the top.
Sample
Small, repeated informally many times
Result
No reader has passed under controlled conditions. Kirlian photography records corona discharge, which varies with moisture, pressure and voltage — a damp hand photographs differently from a dry one.
We add a second finding of our own: 19 of the 31 colours people search for as auras have no wavelength at all. Pink, magenta, gold, brown, grey, white and black are constructed by the brain, not present in light.
Claim
Seeing a coloured field around a person and reading it
Word from
Greek aura "breeze"
Status
Tested, never passed
Where the word comes from
The modern sense comes from Theosophy in the 1880s; Kirlian photography, often offered as evidence, dates to 1939.
What psychology offers instead
Synaesthesia
Some people genuinely experience colours linked to people or emotions, a known and consistent form of synaesthesia.
Reading the person
Posture, expression and clothing inform the "aura" description as much as anything seen.
How to test it fairly yourself
Place people behind an opaque screen that leaves only the space above it visible, and ask the reader to say whether someone is standing there and describe their aura. If an aura extends beyond the body, it should be detectable when the body is hidden.