Several groups of people genuinely see colored halos, glows, or light patterns around other people or objects, but the explanations are neurological rather than supernatural. Some have a brain wiring difference called synesthesia that automatically links people’s faces to specific colors. Others experience visual auras as symptoms of migraines, seizures, or vision loss. And almost anyone can produce aura-like visual effects through normal quirks of how eyes and brains process light.
Synesthetes Who See Colors Around People
About 2% to 4% of the general population has synesthesia, a condition where stimulation of one sense automatically triggers a sensation in another. Most research has focused on people who see colors when hearing sounds or reading numbers, but one subtype is directly relevant to auras: personality-color synesthesia. People with this form see colored halos or glows around the heads of people they know. The colors are consistent and involuntary. The same person always produces the same color.
Brain imaging research published in Current Opinion in Neurology suggests this happens because of cross-activation between the brain’s face recognition area and a neighboring region responsible for processing color. Synesthetes in general show increased connectivity inside and between sensory regions compared to non-synesthetes. Their brains recruit more visual areas when processing information, while non-synesthetes rely more heavily on frontal and parietal regions for the same tasks.
There’s also an important distinction between two types of synesthetes. “Projectors” experience their color sensations in external space, meaning they literally see the color out in the world, hovering around a person or overlaying text on a page. “Associators” experience the same colors but in their mind’s eye, more like an automatic mental image than something visually present. Projectors appear to use a bottom-up brain mechanism where sensory input directly triggers color, while associators use a top-down pathway involving higher-level brain processing. The projector experience is the one that most closely matches traditional descriptions of seeing auras.
Synesthesia runs in families and is considered a heritable trait. It isn’t a disorder or a choice. People who have it often don’t realize their experience is unusual until they describe it to someone else.
Migraine Aura
Migraine with aura (once called classic migraine) produces vivid visual disturbances that typically start in the center of your visual field and spread outward. These can include zigzag lines, shimmering spots or stars, blind spots outlined by geometric shapes, flashes of light, and temporary changes in vision or partial vision loss. Visual symptoms are the most common type of migraine aura.
These episodes usually last less than 60 minutes and strike before or alongside the headache itself. They’re caused by a wave of electrical activity spreading across the brain’s visual processing areas, not by anything happening in the eyes. A related condition called retinal migraine produces similar visual effects but only in one eye.
Seizure-Related Visual Auras
Focal seizures originating in the brain’s visual processing regions can produce visual auras as a warning sign before the seizure fully develops. Seizures starting in the occipital lobe (the brain’s primary visual center) tend to produce elementary sensations like flashes, colored spots, or simple patterns. Seizures beginning in nearby areas of the cortex can produce more complex formed hallucinations, including images of people, animals, or scenes. About 36% of people with epilepsy experience focal seizures that can include these kinds of aura symptoms.
Visual Hallucinations From Vision Loss
Charles Bonnet Syndrome causes visual hallucinations in people who have significant vision loss from eye disease or damage to the optic pathway. The hallucinations range from simple flashes, lines, and geometric patterns to fully formed, detailed images of people, faces, animals, landscapes, or buildings. They tend to be vivid and colorful. The key feature is that the person recognizes these images aren’t real. There’s no psychiatric illness involved. The brain, deprived of normal visual input, essentially fills in the gaps with generated images.
Simple hallucinations (light flashes, shapes, grid-like patterns) are far more common than complex ones, occurring in about 90% of CBS cases compared to 37% who see formed images. These hallucinations are purely visual, with no accompanying sounds or physical sensations.
Normal Visual Effects Anyone Can Experience
Two well-documented visual phenomena can make almost anyone perceive aura-like glows around people or objects, no neurological condition required.
The first is afterimages from cone cell fatigue. The color-sensing cells in your retina become fatigued when you stare at an object for an extended period. When those cells temporarily stop responding, you see a complementary-color ghost of whatever you were looking at. If you stare at someone standing against a plain background, you can perceive a faint glow or halo of color around them. This is the same mechanism that makes you see a green spot after staring at a red light.
The second is Troxler fading. When you hold your gaze steady, low-contrast objects in your peripheral vision gradually disappear as your neurons adapt to the unchanging input. The area where the faded object was gets “filled in” by the surrounding background. If you stare fixedly at someone’s face, the area around their body in your peripheral vision can shift, shimmer, or appear to glow as the background fades and fills in unevenly. This is a normal product of how the visual system handles stable images, not evidence of energy fields.
What About Aura Photography?
Kirlian photography, sometimes marketed as “aura photography,” captures real light patterns around objects, but the explanation is straightforward physics. The process works by running electricity through an object placed on a photographic plate. When the electric charge moves through the surrounding air quickly enough, it strips electrons from air molecules. When those electrons recombine, they emit light. This is the same phenomenon that makes neon signs glow.
The resulting images show complex, colorful patterns that change based on the object’s shape, moisture content, and conductivity. Sharp or pointed features produce brighter discharge patterns. One famous experiment seemed to show a “phantom leaf” effect, where the glow of a torn leaf tip persisted even after the tip was removed. This was later explained by moisture residue left on the glass plate. When the plate was wiped clean, the phantom image disappeared entirely.
The patterns are real, but they reflect electrical properties and surface moisture, not metaphysical energy.