I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:

1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).

2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.

For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often. The nature of the disorder is that my brain can't filter out its own sensory noise properly, giving rise to a lot of visual artefacts that non-disordered brains filter out. These range from 'TV static' to stuff that's not a million miles away from diffusion model artefacts, but the auras around people I see pretty much all the time especially against plain backgrounds. It's not very well-known or studied but fMRI studies have recently implicated the same serotonin receptor psychedelics target, and it's also linked to migraine.

I think this disorder being more prevalent than expected would be a good explanation for auras. It was once thought to be very rare, but many people who have it aren't actually affected enough to seek out a diagnosis. It wouldn't be an unreasonable source for images like auras, saints' haloes, and other things like that since they're just an ordinary part of vision for me. I also think it somewhat vindicates Aldous Huxley's thoughts on the subject.

I really like the idea of electrical fields being somehow important for consciousness, and it's not something I'd rule out off the bat. I just think that disorders of perception are a better explanation for auras and similar phenomena.

Bioelectricity too, which is just now starting to get properly researched (see Michael Levin's stuff).

The Meta paper [1] is much more useful. They claim to be reading out what someone is seeing, in a rather approximate way. The sensing is improving. One project was able to sense magnetic fields at 13 points at 1KHZ using a custom helmet fitted with sensors.[2] The technology is still in the early stages, but they got rid of the high vacuum and cyrogenics needed for SQUID sensors. Progress.

This currently has fewer data points than functional MRI, but more bandwith. fMRI, after all, is measuring blood flow. It's like trying to figure out what an IC is doing by watching its infra-red heat emissions. "Look, the FPU is working hard now."

That paper is a few years old. What's been going on since?

[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magneto...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6063354/

It's tentatively proven that humans react to large magnetic fields. The reaction can come from simple interference, without ever being processed as a sense.

But there's so much more bullshit. That an MEG measurement was decoded only means that the brain produces a magnetic field that correlates with the information it is processing. So there's no Faraday cage in our head. Great. But the brain already knows what it is doing. All that information is there, very fast and reliable. Why should it try to decode its much less detailed and very weak magnetic field then? Where are the sensors? MEG needs super-conduction to work, and doesn't work when there's any disturbance. In the institute where I worked, it was forbidden to use carts (for moving equipment or coffee or whatever) on all floors in the corner where the MEG was located when there was an experiment going on, because it would disturb measurements. A few crystals aren't going to overcome those problems.

> The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness

OMFG. There's really no point in reading this.

It's literally “What's the reason that the machinery of the brain doesn't use this mechanism, given this proof that the effect could in principle be used?”. A similar question can be made for quantum mechanical interference in the brain (which to be clear I feel is adequately answered by “the brain is a wildly inappropriate vehicle for harnessing interference effects).

And the paper is clearly the ancestor to the article itself, based on the date (5dec -> 11dec)

I’m surprised this made it to the front page of HN. I think AI tools are making it easier to create increasingly plausible-sounding bullshit, and gradually overwhelming the defenses of this community.

Do you have a link to the pmeumatic headphones study you mention?