Afterimages and visual effects
Staring at a person against a plain background produces edge effects and color afterimages.
Tested, never passed
Aura reading
Aura reading is the claimed ability of seeing a colored field around a person and reading it. Status: tested, never passed.
- Status
- Tested never passed
- Word in use since
- 1880s Greek aura "breeze"
- Key test
- 1997 Gissurarson and Gunnarsson's screen test, J…
Studies and word histories as set out below.
What people describe
Aura readers describe seeing or sensing a colored field around people, with colors linked to mood, health or personality — blue for calm, red for energy, muddy colors for illness or distress.
How it entered the record
The London physician Walter Kilner published "The Human Atmosphere" in 1911, describing colored 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.
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The experiment
Gissurarson and Gunnarsson's screen test, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1997
How it was run
Four screens stood in a row and an experimenter hid behind one of them. If an aura extends beyond the body, it should show above the screen, so the reader had only to say which screen hid a person.
Sample
Ten aura readers and a control group with no claimed ability, 18 sessions of 40 trials each
Result
The aura readers picked the right screen 185 times, where blind guessing predicts 180; the control group scored 196. Kirlian photography, the usual evidence offered, records corona discharge, which varies with moisture, pressure and voltage.
We add a second finding of our own: 19 of the 31 colors people search for as auras have no wavelength at all. Pink, magenta, gold, brown, gray, white and black are constructed by the brain, not present in light.
Claim
Seeing a colored 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.
Of the 8 key tests on these pages, the one for aura reading is the fourth most recent.
What psychology offers instead
Synaesthesia
Some people genuinely experience colors 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.
Cite this page
AstroHot. “Aura reading: The Claim, the Experiment and the Result.” Accessed October 30, 2026. https://astrohot.com/psychic/aura-reading/
For Wikipedia
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