11-16-2010, 05:26 PM
03:52 14 November 2010
Neuroscience 2010
Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor, San Diego
Glowing visions of light that emanate from a person's body, often seen by those claiming to be psychic, really do exist, for some people at least. That's the tantalising conclusion of a study on a new form of emotion-colour synaesthesia which projects itself as coloured auras.
Other forms of synaesthesia include numbers and letters that evoke colours, touch that evokes emotions and colours with their own fragrances. Now, Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, have identified a new type of synaesthesia in a man whose emotions give rise to colours, which can take the form of auras surrounding other people.
The synaesthete in question, anonymously called RF, is a 23 year-old male who has a mild form of autism called Asperger's syndrome.
At the age of 10, RF's mum told him to try to match a colour with each of his emotions in an effort to aid his previous inability to identify and communicate his emotions. Having followed her advice, RF soon reported actually seeing the colours in his mind when he felt different emotions.
This evolved over a number of years until he described experiencing "auras of colour" around other people depending on the emotion he related to them. He says that everyone's aura is blue to begin with, and changes as soon as he associates a particular emotion with them.
To test RF's seemingly self-generated synaesthesia, Ramachandran's team placed a female volunteer against a white background. They proceeded to draw an outline around her body with a black pen.
Surprisingly, RF reported seeing the volunteer's aura fill the space from her body to the line, no matter how far away from the body the line was drawn.
Next, the team projected either blue or orange letters onto the white background at varying points around the volunteer, either inside or outside of the black line. They asked RF to state what the letter was while timing the speed of his response.
When the letter was blue and inside the black line RF was twice as slow at naming the letter as any other position or colour.
Luke Miller, who presented the study at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego this week, says that the blue letters projected inside the black line are likely to have merged with the perceived blue aura making them more difficult to identify than those outside of the line or coloured orange.
"Some people who claim to be psychic may be telling the truth when they say they can see auras, perhaps they are on this spectrum of synaesthesia," says Elizabeth Seckel, who also worked on the project. They could be empathising with another person's emotions and projecting this onto the person as a coloured aura, adds Miller.
Miller has come across subsequent people who claim to have similar emotion-colour synaesthesia, but is yet to test their abilities. The team hope to next use MRI scans to find out which areas of the brain may be responsible for the illusion, although they hypothesise that the auras arise from cross-activation between the V4 area of the brain responsible for colour perception and the insular cortex, due to its role in the subjective experience of emotion.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shorts....html#more
Neuroscience 2010
Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor, San Diego
Glowing visions of light that emanate from a person's body, often seen by those claiming to be psychic, really do exist, for some people at least. That's the tantalising conclusion of a study on a new form of emotion-colour synaesthesia which projects itself as coloured auras.
Other forms of synaesthesia include numbers and letters that evoke colours, touch that evokes emotions and colours with their own fragrances. Now, Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, have identified a new type of synaesthesia in a man whose emotions give rise to colours, which can take the form of auras surrounding other people.
The synaesthete in question, anonymously called RF, is a 23 year-old male who has a mild form of autism called Asperger's syndrome.
At the age of 10, RF's mum told him to try to match a colour with each of his emotions in an effort to aid his previous inability to identify and communicate his emotions. Having followed her advice, RF soon reported actually seeing the colours in his mind when he felt different emotions.
This evolved over a number of years until he described experiencing "auras of colour" around other people depending on the emotion he related to them. He says that everyone's aura is blue to begin with, and changes as soon as he associates a particular emotion with them.
To test RF's seemingly self-generated synaesthesia, Ramachandran's team placed a female volunteer against a white background. They proceeded to draw an outline around her body with a black pen.
Surprisingly, RF reported seeing the volunteer's aura fill the space from her body to the line, no matter how far away from the body the line was drawn.
Next, the team projected either blue or orange letters onto the white background at varying points around the volunteer, either inside or outside of the black line. They asked RF to state what the letter was while timing the speed of his response.
When the letter was blue and inside the black line RF was twice as slow at naming the letter as any other position or colour.
Luke Miller, who presented the study at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego this week, says that the blue letters projected inside the black line are likely to have merged with the perceived blue aura making them more difficult to identify than those outside of the line or coloured orange.
"Some people who claim to be psychic may be telling the truth when they say they can see auras, perhaps they are on this spectrum of synaesthesia," says Elizabeth Seckel, who also worked on the project. They could be empathising with another person's emotions and projecting this onto the person as a coloured aura, adds Miller.
Miller has come across subsequent people who claim to have similar emotion-colour synaesthesia, but is yet to test their abilities. The team hope to next use MRI scans to find out which areas of the brain may be responsible for the illusion, although they hypothesise that the auras arise from cross-activation between the V4 area of the brain responsible for colour perception and the insular cortex, due to its role in the subjective experience of emotion.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shorts....html#more