Aura Quest
Anchorage researcher hopes energy-sensing camera can be used to assess human health.
(Published: December 16, 2003)
Using readings taken from fingers, the GDV device prints out a picture of a person's aura. (Photo by Bill Roth / Anchorage Daily News)
Have you ever sensed someone was standing right behind you, even though you didn't hear or see the person approach?
That would be because every human being has an aura, or energy field, that surrounds and extends past the physical body, said Lyn Freeman, an Alaska researcher who explores mind-body connections.
Mystics have reported seeing halos of light emanating from humans. But for most of us, Freeman said, the energy of an aura is too subtle to see. No one has proved scientifically that auras exist.
Until now, perhaps.
Freeman and her husband, Derek Welton, recently purchased an unusual camera from Russia called a gas discharge visualization (GDV) device, or aura camera. They believe it records the innermost layer of a person's energy field.
That closest-in layer of seven is the one most connected to the physical body. It is known by those who study such things as the health aura and can give clues about a person's health, according to Freeman.
By conducting studies with the aura camera in a scientific manner, Freeman, Welton and other researchers hope the camera will help to document.
the existence of auras and perhaps even validate the effectiveness of some forms of alternative medicine.
They also hope it might be used someday in the United States as a tool to help assess a person's physical and mental well-being. Freeman said it is already being used in some medical settings in Russia to help screen for breast and lung cancer.
In this country, the aura camera is not approved as a diagnostic tool. But its effectiveness is being studied, even by several researchers affiliated with well-known institutions such as the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the University of Virginia.
"We're just getting our feet wet," said Welton, an engineer and director of network engineering for a local telecommunications firm who cooperates with his wife in her studies.
HOW IT WORKS
The camera works essentially by creating a small, harmless electric charge that causes energy to emanate from a fingertip placed on the camera's lens. The way that energy cascades out from the finger is believed to have significance, Freeman said.
The aura camera relies on the meridian system used in acupuncture (and based on ancient Chinese medicine), which connects points on a person's finger to various organs within the body. After the energy of all 10 fingers has been recorded by the camera, a computer program melds them together to give an overall picture of a person's aura, health and basic mental well-being.
A healthy aura will be depicted by the device as a uniform glow of a certain intensity and brightness surrounding a human figure. The aura of an unwell person will show up as a jagged halo around the figure, full of holes or spikes.
The locations of the holes or spikes in the aura correlate -- again using the Chinese meridian system -- to places in the body. A weak aura around one of the fingertips, for example, could signal a compromised kidney.
Freeman, who is on the faculty at the Saybrook Graduate School, a psychology school based in San Francisco, has already begun studies with the device aimed at finding out whether meditation, acupuncture and other alternative therapies can affect a person's health aura.
Freeman said she has found that an hour of meditation can positively affect a person's aura. She also plans to study traditional healers in Alaska to document whether their treatments work and even to capture images of energy flowing from healer to patient.
"This machine can tell you if there's a flow of energy between human beings," Freeman asserts.
Freeman acknowledges the concept of an aura camera may be a bit out there for the general public. But she is quick to point out that the device she and her husband bought for $15,000 from its Russian inventor, physicist Konstantin Korotkov, is not the same as those sometimes set up at psychic fairs.
Some have claimed that aura devices can peer into the human soul to reveal personality traits or the spiritual potential of the subject. The color of a person's aura is often central in those readings. And for a fee, these aura readers will correct imbalances with crystal therapy.
Freeman said she and Welton plan to use the device only for research, not for those sorts of ad hoc readings. Besides, she noted, the colors with her camera can easily be changed by a click of the mouse, just as a background screen on a computer can be changed for a different view.
"Some people play with these like they're games, and they're not," Freeman said.
ORIGINS
The idea of a device to photograph the aura is based on many years of experimentation and study into the human energy field, Freeman said.
As far back as 1880, Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer and scientist, demonstrated that connecting the body to a high-frequency electric current causes the body to fluoresce. In 1939, a Russian electrician, Semyon Kirlian, noticed fluorescence surrounding his fingers while he was repairing high-frequency equipment. He devoted the rest of his life trying to photograph and explain the phenomenon.
His technique, which became known as Kirlian photography, gained popularity in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
The camera that Freeman and Welton bought was invented by Korotkov in 1995. Last summer, the Anchorage couple traveled to St. Petersburg to meet Korotkov and get training and certification for the device at an international conference on the study of energy fields.
Freeman said she mailed the machine to Alaska rather than trying to carry it home on the airplane.
"I wasn't about to walk through an airport and explain how this machine assesses photon emissions from the human body," Freeman said, laughing. "I could just see the response. We'd never get home."
Freeman said she plans to apply for grants to conduct studies using the device. But for now, she and her husband are largely doing research on their own time. For them, it's exciting to see some of the mind-body connections they have long studied finally documented.
"It's our retirement passion," Freeman said.
The couple demonstrated the machine at a traditional healing conference in Anchorage this fall.
Auggie Nelson, a Native healer from Kotzebue, said he was intrigued by the demonstration. He works with patients with circulation problems and, through touch, tries to get the blood flowing correctly again. After the demonstration, he said he would be curious to see the aura camera used on some of his patients before and after his treatments.
"I believe there would be a great difference in their auras," he said. "It's quite a project. I was in awe".
RESEARCH ELSEWHERE
Freeman and Welton are not the only researchers interested in the camera. The device has garnered interest even among a few conventional scientists.
Dr. Clair Francomano, a senior investigator and section chief in the Laboratory of Genetics at the National Institute on Aging, is one. She is an internist and medical geneticist and also a part-time faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. Her research has focused largely on heritable disorders of connective tissue, but she is also interested in the connections between alternative and conventional medicine. She believes the gas discharge visualization device might help break down barriers between the two forms of medicine.
Francomano noted that tests of the device have shown no more than 5 percent to 10 percent variation in the aura readings of a healthy individual over time. People with serious psychiatric or emotional problems vary a great deal from reading to reading, she added.
Francomano said she is still awaiting review of the device by one of NIA's two institutional review boards, which ensure that tests done by the NIA pose no significant risks to human subjects. As soon as she gets the go-ahead, she said, she will use the camera to study people suffering from organ failure. With carefully controlled scientific studies, she is planning to see if the camera can detect which organ is ailing.
"I wanted to start with something that was irrefutable, where there was no question about the diagnosis," she said.
Even so, Francomano said she expects a certain segment of the medical profession to remain skeptical no matter what studies show. But like Welton and Freeman, she is guardedly optimistic that at least some in the medical community will be swayed if study results are positive.
"I've been intrigued enough with what I've seen so far that I'm willing to invest the time," Francomano said.
( For more pictures, and original story, click on link )
~*~
Bodies of light
Mark Pilkington
Thursday February 5, 2004
The Guardian
In 1939, while repairing high frequency electrotherapy equipment at his workshop in Krasnodar, Russia, the inventor and electrician Semyon Davidovich Kirlian made a spectacular discovery. When he attached a sparking electrode to his hand and placed it on to a photographic plate, the plate revealed the image of a glowing, blue, hand-shaped halo.
Over several years, Kirlian and his journalist wife Valentina developed equipment that allowed them to view moving objects in real time, creating dazzling visual effects. Encouraged by visits from scientific dignitaries, the Kirlians became convinced that their bioluminescent images showed a life force or energy field that reflected the physical and emotional states of their living subjects, and could even diagnose illnesses. In 1961 they published their first paper, in the Russian Journal of Scientific and Applied Photography, and their story then reached the west via the 1970 book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.
The Kirlians' images struck a chord with Dr Thelma Moss, a parapsychologist and LSD-therapy enthusiast at the University of California, Los Angeles. Moss made several trips to see the Kirlians in the USSR, where their techniques were being taken seriously and being used in space research. Particularly impressive were claims that when a leaf is cut in two under Kirlian imaging, an outline of its missing half persists for some time, suggesting, they felt, the presence of an "energetic body". Moss considered the Kirlians' images to be documentary evidence of the subtle bodies and auras described by mystics, and used them to promote traditional ideas about healing and life force.
What the images actually reveal, scientists at Philadelphia's Drexel University discovered in the late 1970s, is a kind of corona discharge like that produced when dragging your feet on a carpet, or in the film St Elmo's Fire. The team, partly sponsored by the US defence department, found that the visual effect was dependent on moisture levels on the subject's skin, similar to how a lie detector works or the Scientologists' E-meter. The team failed to recreate the "phantom leaf" effect.
Despite those "aura photography" stalls at New Age fairs, the astral body remains an elusive quarry.
~*~
My favourite aunt is purple: Why some people see 'auras' around their loved ones
October, 18, 2004
Supposed psychic powers that enable people to see auras around others may simply be a quirk of the brain, according to a University College London (UCL) study of a rare form of synaesthesia where some people see colourful 'auras' around their loved ones.
The case study, reported in the October issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology, shows how some people can experience colours in response to people they know or words that evoke emotions a condition known as emotion-colour synaesthesia.
Dr Jamie Ward, author of the study, says: "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. 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 the study, Dr Ward of UCL's Psychology Department documented a woman known as GW who could see colours like purple and blue in response to people she knew or their names when read to her. Words triggered a colour which spread across her whole field of vision, whilst people themselves appeared to have coloured 'auras' projected around them. For example, "James" triggered pink, "Thomas" black and "Hannah" blue.
A similar test using 100 words rated on a scale of 1 to 7 for their emotional impact showed that highly emotive words such as fear or hate also triggered colours. Words associated with positive emotions tended to elicit pink, orange, yellow, and green, whereas words associated with negative emotions triggered brown, grey, and black.
Whilst it is quite common to describe people or emotions metaphorically in terms of colours, GW actually reported vividly seeing them. Indeed, when "James" (a pink word) was written in the wrong colour (e.g. blue), her reaction times were slowed.
Synaesthesia is a condition found in 1 in 2000 people in which stimulation of one sense produces a response in one or more of the other senses. For example, people with synaesthesia may experience shapes with tastes or smells with sounds. It is thought to originate in the brain and some scientists believe it might be caused by a cross-wiring in the brain, for example between centres involved in emotional processing and smell perception. Synaesthesia is known to run in families.
GW, 19-year old with an IQ of 112, 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 synaesthetic colour as she got to know them and the colour was then triggered whenever she was presented with the person's name or face.
In contrast, a case discovered in the 1930s documents a seven year old boy who also 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.
Dr Jamie Ward continues: "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 be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synaesthesia.
"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.
"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."
Notes to the editor:
For more information or to set up an interview, please contact Jenny Gimpel at the UCL Media Relations Office on +44 (0)20 7679 9739, e-mail j.gimpel@ucl.ac.uk.
Emotionally Mediated Synaesthesia, by Jamie Ward, in Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2004, 21(7), p761
Also See:
All Copyrights © are acknowledged. Material reproduced here is for educational and research purposes only.
