Can You See Auras? History, Methods, and What Science Says

The experience is real. The explanation is more interesting than 'energy fields.'

An "aura" is the colored field of energy that some people claim to see surrounding the human body. The idea has a long history, persistent but never scientifically validated. People have been reporting seeing auras around living beings for thousands of years, and modern parapsychologists, new age practitioners, and synesthetes continue to report the experience today.

The question isn't whether people genuinely experience auras — they do. The question is what they're actually seeing.

The history of aura perception

The first detailed Western account comes from Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish scientist and theologian who claimed to see colored auras around people that revealed their moral state. Swedenborg wrote about this extensively in Heaven and Hell (1758) and other theological works. He described different colors corresponding to different character traits — much like the modern system.

The Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875, adopted and expanded the concept. C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant's Thought Forms (1901) included detailed (alleged) photographic reproductions of what thoughts looked like in the aura. These images are not photographs in any technical sense — they were illustrations based on the authors' clairvoyant claims.

Evelyn Underhill, the Anglo-Irish author and mystic, wrote about aura perception in her personal experience, describing it as a sensitivity she developed through meditation practice. Her book Mysticism (1911) remains a classic study of mystical experience, though her aura observations are presented as personal rather than objective.

Kirlian photography — what it actually captured

In the 1930s, Soviet scientist Semyon Kirlian developed a photographic technique that appeared to capture an aura around living objects. When a finger or a leaf was placed on photographic film and subjected to a high-voltage electrical field, a glowing corona appeared around the object. This looked exactly like what mystics described as an aura.

Kirlian photography was genuinely exciting to parapsychologists and alternative medicine practitioners. But by the 1970s, researchers including Bengt Svensson in Sweden demonstrated that the "aura" was a corona discharge — an electrical phenomenon caused by moisture and the electrical conductivity of the object, not a biofield or energy emission. The glow appears around any conductive object, living or dead, when placed in the right conditions. Dry fingers produce smaller auras than moist fingers. Metal objects produce large auras. The phenomenon is real physics, not real auras.

What people might actually be seeing

Several documented phenomena can produce aura-like visual experiences:

• Synesthesia — A neurological condition where stimulation of one sensory pathway triggers experiences in another. Chromesthesia, a form of synesthesia, causes people to see colors in response to sounds. Some synesthetes report seeing colors around people or objects. Synesthesia is well-documented and genuine, though it's a neurological variation, not evidence of an energy field.
• Entoptic phenomena — Visual effects that originate within the eye itself: photopsia (peripheral flashes), floaters, the blue field entoptic effect (shooting white dots in a blue sky), and the phosphenes you see when you rub your eyes. Extended meditation, sensory deprivation, or altered states can intensify these effects, making them feel like they're outside the body.
• Empathy and body language reading — People who are highly attuned to social signals can perceive subtle shifts in posture, micro-expressions, skin color (blushing, pallor), and movement patterns. When these cues accumulate, the observer may experience them as a "feeling" or "energy" around a person. This is your brain's pattern-recognition system working efficiently, not a sixth sense.
• Hypnagogic imagery — Visual experiences at the boundary between waking and sleep. Some aura readers report perceiving auras after extended periods of soft-focus gazing or meditation, both of which can induce mild hypnagogic states. The brain fills in ambiguous visual fields with structured imagery.

Where this leaves us

The aura, as a measurable energy field surrounding the human body, has never been demonstrated. No instrument has detected a consistent, reproducible "aura field" that isn't better explained by known physical phenomena — heat radiation, electromagnetic emission from the body (which is extremely weak and uniform), or optical effects.

That doesn't mean aura readers are lying. They're experiencing something real — they're just attributing it to the wrong cause. The experience might be synesthesia, heightened pattern recognition, empathic sensitivity, or entoptic phenomena. The labeling is where the interpretation diverges from the evidence.

Whether you call it an aura, a heightened sensitivity, or a neurological quirk doesn't change the experience. It does change what you can reasonably claim about it, and there's a big difference between "I perceive something I can't fully explain" and "everyone has a visible energy field that I can read like a report card."

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