

Humans Glow - nreece
http://news.aol.com/article/humans-glow/584160

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rajat
So all the aura readers were right after all?

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pygy
The perception of auras is a kind of synesthesia (emotions => vision). It can
also be related to optical illusions (like contrast amplification).

Spontaneous synesthetic aura perception is very rare, and I don't know if you
can develop it later on, or if secondary "aura readers" percieve the second
kind, or if a strong emotion can trigger the phenomenon is someone who usually
doesn't percieve it.

There's nothing magical related to that.

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pmichaud
Oh, I don't know... magic isn't about the supernatural, magic is about finding
wonder in the mundane. This might qualify as magical.

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eznet
AOL load this page slowly for anyone else?

Direct: <http://www.livescience.com/health/090722-body-glow.html>

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rue
AOL!

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Mz
I've always kind of figured that the halos around holy figures had to be
rooted in something real. Older cultures weren't so big on fictionalizing
things. They generally drew or wrote about something real. Maybe they didn't
understand it well and made up some myth to explain what it seemed like to
them, the way Native Americans (of the northwest) had the idea that the world
was a piece of land floating in a bowl of water and an earthquake was when one
of the gods pushing down on one end of the land, causing it to dip under the
water. This is a fairly accurate representation of the tsunamis that occur
after coastal earthquakes. It makes sense from that perspective as an attempt
to make a logical model of observed events in the face of incomplete
information.

We talk about a bride "glowing" on her wedding day. Perhaps that is not merely
hyperbole. Perhaps it is something subtly perceived. And perhaps halos are
also something subtly perceived. Saying that makes me think of expressions
like "bringer of light" or "a light upon the world".

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onreact-com
I bet the military loves that.

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tlrobinson
Infrared is a bigger problem.

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anigbrowl
I posted this yesterday with the title 'it turns out people glow in the dark'.
Then, as now, I objected to the headline, which should have said that humans
glow in the visible light _spectrum_. One could hardly tell this in a lit
environment, could one?

[/pedant]

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ars
I doubt it. The eye is able to see a single photon. So if humans glowed at
all, people should be able to see it.

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tel
Your eyes have cells which contain pigments which react upon exposure to
single photons. Single photon signal is really, really noisy though and so
your eye requires thousands of such signals to combine in spatially and
temporally relevant patterns before it sends a signal to your brain.

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davi
9 photons for 60% success rate of conscious perception
[http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html)

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tel
Hah, cool finding. I was considering a situation more similar to "detecting
one further photon of light from an already illuminated scene": just-
noticeable difference instead of absolute threshold.

