Skip to main content

Picturing Aura - Jeremy Stolow ***

This is a weird one with a capital W. It really is about auras - or should that be aurae? (The plural surely isn't 'aura' as the title seems to suggest.) I was highly doubtful when someone mentioned this as a popular science book, but they argued 'Plenty of phenomena have been treated with gravity by the sciences without being deemed real in any kind of empirical sense. For example, today we wouldn’t implement any medicine based on the model of the four humours – but it’s important to reckon with that history as part of the history of biology.'

Okay, so were this about the dodgy history of the concept that people have auras - invisible coloured glows around them that can be seen by sensitive souls and captured on camera, it arguably is about psychology and history of science. But I'm not sure the book really does this. What does it even mean, for example, to photograph an aura? Jeremy Stolow tells us that when he had his aura photographed, 'expert' Guy Coggins 'was reticent to offer details about how exactly his system functioned'. Apparently, it combined a photo from a digital camera with data from a metal plate touched by a hand that allegedly measured galvanic skin response. The end product was a portrait with a fuzzy multi-coloured glow around the sitter.

Stolow makes it clear that what resulted was very much part of the new age view of reality, using the aura image both to provide a 'chakra analysis' and the explaining the meaning of his aura colours 'drawing upon a long-established New Age discursive and visual canon.' Hmm. After a second, more technical-sounding approach giving Stolow training in 'human energy field analysis' it feels like he became somewhat more of a convert while remaining sceptical.

We then get a couple of hundred pages of detailed exploration of the pre-scientific history of auras and related phenomena such as haloes, plus various wild related technical developments, such as Kirilan Photography and the whole eastern-philosophised approach to science that was popular in some US West Coast universities in the 60s and 70s. Stolow appears to treat this all as open-mindedly as possible, reporting in a largely uncritical fashion. There is an appendix headed 'The Aura debunked' which opens 'It seems almost impossible to avoid encountering the verdict on pictures of aura (again that odd non-plural) as pseudoscientific nonsense and the stuff of medical quackery'. 

But note the ambivalence in Stolow's comment. He is not saying this is pseudoscientific nonsense, just that it's almost impossible to avoid encountering this verdict. He seems reluctant to support what he describes as the view of 'mainstream science'. Bear in mind Stolow is not a scientist, he is a professor of communication studies.

In the end, while there are elements of the book comparing this historically to theories that have long been discarded, it doesn't really account for all the modern pseudoscience. Stolow's account is not incredibly readable, heavily laden as it is with the academic language of the humanities. I can't say that it's a book I would recommend, except in the same sense I'd recommend reading Alan Sokal infamous paper Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Only, this isn't intended as a joke. But for some it will be interesting.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more