Digest Number 1780

[Theresa Partington]

re auras

Sorry this is such a long post but I thought it was interesting and of
relevance .
bw

Theresa
Article from Daily Telegraph last week.
'Derek tastes of ear wax, Russell Square of celery'
(Filed: 27/10/2004)

James Wannerton, 45, a pub landlord, is bombarded with flavours during
everyday conversation. "I have trouble with certain names. I have a problem
with the word Derek, for instance. It tastes of ear wax." For him, "Covent
Garden" is chocolate, "Edgware Road" tastes of sausage and "Russell Square"
makes him think of celery with toffee. Intriguingly, his synaesthetic tastes
originate from his childhood: there are no associations with foods from
later in his life, such as curry.

GW, 19, became aware of her condition around the age of seven but refrained
from telling her family or friends. In GW's case, people acquired a colour -
an aura - as she got to know them and the colour was then triggered whenever
she was presented with the person's name or face. In the Thirties, a related
case was documented of a seven-year-old boy who associated colours with
people, but saw strangers in bright orange with a black outline which faded
to a mild blue and finally pink when he got to know them.

John Fullwood, 55, a systems engineer, sees colours when he hears numbers.
Yet he has been blind since his childhood. "They're just like flashing
colours. For example, one will be a whitish colour and two will be an
orangey."

Dorothy Latham, 70, an Ofsted inspector, has a colourful way with words. The
words appear as a coloured tickertape band in front of her face. "Norwich is
a bright yellow word, because its N is bright yellow. I imagined that
everyone would be exactly the same until I spoke to school friends and they
said you're a weirdo. So I shut up about it and kept quiet."
Why Miles Davis saw the blues

Auras exist, but inside our brains because of a mix-up between the
different senses, says Roger Highfield

The ability to see an aura shimmering around a person is one of the more
common, and colourful, "psychic powers" that some people claim to possess.
Now scientists have become convinced that these auras are real - at least in
the mind of the beholder - and are very revealing.
Kind of blue: jazz legend Miles Davis, the poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud and
the composer Lizst were all synaesthetes

They have nothing to do with "energy fields", hotlines to the spirit world
or glimpses of other dimensions, but they do reveal something profound about
the design of the brain. Intriguingly, there is evidence that this
apparently magical ability may be much more common than thought, and may
provide insights into how our ancestors first evolved language.

Language and mysterious auras may be linked by a bizarre mixing of the
senses called synaesthesia. Some people with this condition can experience
colours in response to people they know or in reaction to "love", "hate" and
other words that evoke emotions. This is known as emotion-colour
synaesthesia.

Now a new study, reported in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology by Dr
Jamie Ward's team from University College London, shows how this rare form
of synaesthesia can also make some people see colourful halos and auras
around their loved ones. "A popular notion is that some people have a
magical ability to detect the hidden emotions of others by seeing a
colourful `aura' or energy field that they give off," says Dr Ward. "The
ability of some people to see the coloured auras of others has held an
important place in folklore and mysticism throughout the ages."

Although many people claiming to have such powers could well be charlatans,
"our study suggests a different interpretation. These colours do not reflect
hidden energies being given off by other people, rather they are created
entirely in the brain of the beholder."

In his study, Dr Ward described the case of GW, a young woman who could see
colours such as purple and blue in response to people she knew or to the
sound of their names. Words triggered a colour which spread across her field
of vision, while people themselves appeared to have coloured "auras"
projected around them. For example, "James" triggered pink, "Thomas" black
and "Hannah" blue. In this way, the colour of a person's aura revealed the
way GW felt about that person. Similarly, when GW felt she was in a happy
party, the venue took on a red tint.

When GW took a test in which she rated 100 words on a scale of one to seven
for their emotional impact, the UCL team found that highly emotive words
such as fear or hate also triggered colours. Words associated with positive
and happy emotions tended to elicit pink, orange, yellow and green. But
words associated with negative and gloomy emotions triggered brown, grey and
black.

"GW does not believe she has mystical powers and has no interest in the
occult, but it is not hard to imagine how, in a different age or culture,
such an interpretation could arise," says Dr Ward. "Rather than assuming
that people give off auras or energy fields that can only be detected by
rigged cameras or trained seers, we need only assume that the phenomenon of
synaesthesia is taking place."

Saints have often been depicted with an aura and this may tell us something
about the artists who painted them. Many creative people have been thought
to have the two-for-one sensory experience of synaesthesia. Vladimir
Nabokov, the author, wrote: "I have this rather freakish gift of seeing
letters in colours." Other synaesthetes include the jazz legend Miles Davis,
the poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud and the composer Lizst.

Previous estimates suggested as few as one in every 25,000 people - and more
women than men - have synaesthesia. Recently, in BBC2's Horizon programme,
Dr Ward described how he has launched an effort to find out how common the
condition really is, after finding, when conducting straw polls among his
students, that as many as one in 100 claim to have it.

In one study, he has been asking passers-by to take part in an experiment in
which they are - without realising it - tested for synaesthesia. The test is
designed to show that synaesthetes would consistently link the same colours
to the same letters and numbers while normal people would use guesswork. The
study is still under way, but if its preliminary findings are backed it
suggests that there could be as many as half a million people in Britain who
see coloured letters and numbers, many probably not realising that this is
unusual.

"If you start asking your friends and relatives, it's not beyond the realms
of possibility you'll soon find a synaesthete and they may not know it,"
says Dr Ward.

A follow-up study is even more startling: we may all be affected to some
extent. The insight came when Dr Ward studied synaesthete Dorothy Latham,
70; when she hears notes go from low to high, the colours she sees go from
purple to black and mid-brown to yellow and white. "What this suggests is
that there is some organising principle which dictates how individual notes
get associated with particular colours," said Dr Ward.

He was surprised when he repeated the experiment with a control group of
non-synaesthetes, revealing a similar association of darker colours and low
pitched notes to lighter colours/high pitched notes.

"Beneath the surface we all have mechanisms that link together sound and
vision and the mechanisms seem to be pretty much the same in both
synaesthetes and other members of the population," says Dr Ward. "So we're
all in a way synaesthetes, even if we don't realise it."

Clues to the "purpose" of muddled senses came from another synaesthete,
Heather Birt, 28, a music teacher who sees coloured numbers arranged in
three- dimensional space around her. The mechanism that links numbers to
colours also seems to stimulate the part of her brain that produces a sense
of space. When he investigated, Dr Ward found this ability to work with
numbers by arranging them in space was common.

"In fact we all seem to do this, even though most of us are completely
unaware of it," he says. "We tend to think about numbers being arranged from
left to right in space, but only synaesthetes have the ability to sense it."

Perhaps synaesthesia enables us to deal with abstract concepts and other
sequences in a concrete way. Some scientists go further. Because he has
found that full-blown synaesthesia is eight times more common among artists,
poets and novelists than in the general population, Prof Vilayanur
Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, believes it is
linked with creativity. "The basis of creativity is seeing unexpected links,
sometimes even making seemingly random links and picking the ones which make
sense or which are beautiful. This is the basis of all creativity, whether
in poetry, visual art or literature."

And he believes that our common ability to link sounds and objects may have
been the springboard to language. The connection between our senses of
hearing and vision was an important step towards the creation of words,
perhaps when our earliest ancestors used sounds that evoked the object they
wished to describe.
*and*
Argument dates back to blind man and trumpet
(Filed: 27/10/2004)

The debate about whether what synaesthetes claim to perceive is what they
experience stretches back to John Locke, who in his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding in 1690 referred to a blind man who thought scarlet was like
the sound of a trumpet.

Now scientists are convinced synaesthesia is real. One explanation has been
advanced by Prof Vilayanur Ramachandran and Dr Edward Hubbard from the
University of California, San Diego, based on an idea that has been around
for decades: that synaesthesia is caused by a subtle "cross-activation" of
regions in the brain.

Recent brain-mapping studies have found that a primary colour area is
adjacent to part of the brain that handles numbers and letters. Another
colour area lies next to the bit that handles sound. If the nerve cells in
these regions were more densely wired or more strongly connected than
normal, it could explain why some people see words, numbers and sounds in
colour.

Prof Colin Blakemore of Oxford University said there is evidence that
synaesthesia is genetically influenced probably as much as conditions like
autism and dyslexia. But related synaesthetes don't always see the same
letters as the same colours, suggesting environment also plays a role.