Amos,

why have you addressed your last post to me only and not also to Carol?? Or: Why do you never in all these discussions bring up this point about controlled experiments when a believer tells about a purportedly successfuil experiment or proposes how such an experiment could be done? Why do you remember this point always exactly in that moment when a skeptic starts criticising an experiment or questions the interpretation?

Carol,

there's nothing wrong in principle with doing many tests at different times. It has the advantage of less effort and the disadvantage of less power (for the error variance term is bound to be inflated this way), but that problem could be overcome by increasing the sample size. Maybe I was wrong (it couldn't be told from your description) but I had the impression that you did not know what the correct sampling for the statistical analysis was.

Clint,

all claims of seeing auras I know of describe the aura as surrounding the body that is to be a bit wider than the body. So if you place a person behind a screen (window frame/open door) blocking vision in such a way that the person is just a tiny bit ot ouf the line of vision then the aura should extend to the line of vision and should be visible under these conditions. That's the idea of a screen experiment. Of course, no aura is detectable in such a condition.

I'm sure that Two Bears's teaching seeing the aura in five minutes makes use of well known properties of our visual system: (1) the eyes are never motionless but are even moving a bit when we fixate some stimulus (2) the firing of the neurons will decrease when they are stimulated with the same stimulus over an extended time (30 seconds suffice under good viewing conditions to demonstrate that effect in a lecture hall).

These two properties in combination lead inevitably to seeing a lighter surround when we fixate any dark object(living matter or not) in front of a bright background for a short time (1 min should be enough under most viewing conditions) without consciously moving our eyes from the target and vice versa for a bright object in front of a dark background. It's simple and everybody of my students sees it when I make that demonstration. The 'aura' even can be coloured and these colours change over time (different relaxation times for the three colour systems).

As for feeling my guess is that Two Bears uses a mixture of feeling the body heat radiation (most times higher than the surrounding air) and perhaps some imagination in his pupils. The only thing I am not sure about is whether he knows how he does it and is a trickster conning some people or whether he truly believes himself.

Wolfgang