IT MAY sound like folklore, but a handful of people really can see colourful 鈥渉aloes鈥� around others.
Some people claim to experience a form of synaesthesia 鈥� a crossing of the senses 鈥� that makes them see a coloured light around other people that varies in hue with emotions.
A 23-year-old man with Asperger鈥檚 disorder, identified as T. K., says he has the condition and it helps him with emotional reciprocity. To explore this claim, at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues put a volunteer 鈥� who T. K. said had a blue halo 鈥� in front of a white screen. T. K. was slower to identify blue letters when they were projected onto the volunteer鈥檚 blue halo than if they were projected elsewhere on the screen. He had no difficulty identifying orange letters, wherever they were on the screen.
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Non-synaesthetes were as quick to identify letters regardless of their colour or placement ().
Other researchers contacted by New Scientist said that the consistent response times would be difficult for T. K. to fake.