Children See Dead People: Children’s Spooky Powers

By Rob Armstrong

One of the most famous lines in movie history is, “I see dead people”, uttered by a young boy. Is there any reason to believe that children can see the dead? Do they have spooky powers denied to adults? Do they grow out of these powers as they reach puberty? Do they forget that they once interacted with the dead?

One study says that by age seven, 65 percent of children have had an imaginary friend. Are these “imaginary friends” actually spirits? Do children have the dead as their “imaginary” playmates? They’re not imaginary at all. They’re real, but they’re dead!

Children are natural mediums, psychics, and necromancers. They can channel the other world.

Is the poltergeist phenomenon caused by children’s imaginary friends? Can imaginary friends operate externally to children’s minds? Are some children in cahoots with spirits?

There is nothing more fascinating than the psychic abilities of children and the astonishing thing that eventually happens to them which suppresses their paranormal powers in order to allow them to enter the normal world, the adult world.

What would you prefer – to remain a child all your life and have paranormal powers, or to become an adult and sacrifice your paranormal powers? Nature has made this a tradeoff. Do you want to be Peter Pan, who can fly but can never grow up, or do you want to join the adults and have adult fun and also adult responsibilities?

Why do children lose their natural powers? Is it possible to get these powers back? Can adults recover their lost paranormal abilities, the abilities which society warned them as children never to play with?

It’s always dangerous to play with fire. It’s even more dangerous to ignore your natural fire. Isn’t it time to light up your life?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447831662

Rob Armstrong

Rob Armstrong researches all things paranormal.

Book preview

Children See Dead People

Children’s Spooky Powers

Rob Armstrong

Copyright © Rob Armstrong 2023

All rights reserved.

978-1-4478-3166-2

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

Children See Dead People

Ghost Sight

Parapsychology

Ghostbusters

Dissociation

Constructed Friends

Theories of Hypnosis

Relaxation

The Origins of Hypnotism

The Aliens Are Here

The Wada Test

Enter the Language Zone

The Astounding Walk

Brainwaves and Psychology

The Ark of the Covenant

Providence

Mind Projection

Cosmic Consciousness

The Schizophrenics

The Dreams of Children

System 1 and System 2 Thinking

Free Speech

The Power of Language

The Master?

The Trickster

Conclusion

Ghost Sight

One of the most famous lines in movie history is, I see dead people, uttered by a young boy. Is there any reason to believe that children can see the dead? Do they have spooky powers denied to adults? Do they grow out of these powers as they reach puberty? Do they forget that they once interacted with the dead?

One study says that by age seven, 65 percent of children have had an imaginary friend. Are these imaginary friends actually spirits? Do children have the dead as their imaginary playmates? They’re not imaginary at all. They’re real, but they’re dead!

Children are natural mediums, psychics, and necromancers. They can channel the other world.

Is the poltergeist phenomenon caused by children’s imaginary friends? Can imaginary friends operate externally to children’s minds? Are some children in cahoots with spirits?

There is nothing more fascinating than the psychic abilities of children and the astonishing thing that eventually happens to them which suppresses their paranormal powers in order to allow them to enter the normal world, the adult world.

What would you prefer – to remain a child all your life and have paranormal powers, or to become an adult and sacrifice your paranormal powers? Nature has made this a tradeoff. Do you want to be Peter Pan, who can fly but can never grow up, or do you want to join the adults and have adult fun and also adult responsibilities?

Why do children lose their natural powers? Is it possible to get these powers back? Can adults recover their lost paranormal abilities, the abilities which society warned them as children never to play with?

It’s always dangerous to play with fire. It’s even more dangerous to ignore your natural fire. Isn’t it time to light up your life?

The Gift

Some children are sensitives. They have the gift … they see ghosts and they talk to ghosts.

Why should children be able to do what adults cannot? One of the reasons is that children’s brains are much more active. They’re going through changes. There’s a process called synaptic pruning which is vital to the development of children’s brains. Jacquelyn Cafasso wrote, Synaptic pruning is a natural process that occurs in the brain between early childhood and adulthood. During synaptic pruning, the brain eliminates extra synapses. Synapses are brain structures that allow the neurons to transmit an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron. … Synaptic pruning is thought to be the brain’s way of removing connections in the brain that are no longer needed. … Once the brain forms a synapse, it can either be strengthened or weakened. This depends on how often the synapse is used. In other words, the process follows the ‘use it or lose it’ principle: Synapses that are more active are strengthened, and synapses that are less active are weakened and ultimately pruned. The process of removing the irrelevant synapses during this time is referred to as synaptic pruning.

Children start out with an enormous surplus of synapses, reflecting their immense potential, and then have to get rid of this excess to make the brain more efficient, focused and specialized.

Are some of these juvenile synapses ghost synapses? Children, perhaps, can use them to see ghosts, but if they don’t use them – and their use is strongly discouraged by society – then they lose them. They relinquish their Ghost Sight.

Jacquelyn Cafasso wrote, During the second year of life, the number of synapses drops dramatically. Synaptic pruning happens very quickly between ages 2 and 10. During this time, about 50 percent of the extra synapses are eliminated. In the visual cortex, pruning continues until about 6 years of age.

Let’s imagine that up to the age of 6, children have a much more powerful visual cortex and can see things that older children and adults simply cannot see. Older children who undergo a slower rate of synaptic pruning in the visual cortex may also see things denied to others.

Synapse-heavy brains – those with many more synapses than are present in adult brains – are much more likely to be synesthesic. Dr. Veronica Gross wrote, "Synesthesia is loosely defined as ‘senses coming together,’ which is just a translation of the Greek (etymology: syn – together; esthesia from aesthesis – sensation). At its simplest level, synesthesia means that when a certain sense or part of a sense is activated, another unrelated sense or part of a sense is activated concurrently. For example, when someone hears a sound, he or she immediately sees a color or shape in their ‘mind’s eye.’ People that have synesthesia are called synesthetes."

To understand synesthesia, it’s essential to grasp that people have two sets of senses: 1) the external, physical sense organs, and 2) their internal, mental counterparts. Your internal, mental senses are the ones active during your dreams. You can see in your dreams even though your eyes are physically closed. You can hear even though the external environment is making no sounds. You can taste, smell and touch, but all in your mind. You are typically making up – hallucinating – this internal sensory content. But your internal senses can also apply to the external environment, as in out-of-body experiences, where you are sensing the external world but not via the sense organs of your body, given that your body is asleep on a bed.

With basic synesthesia, a sensation in an external sense organ produces a correlated sensation in an ostensibly unrelated internal sense. A physical sight might cause a synesthete to hear a specific internal sound. A physical sound might cause a synesthete to internally see a specific color or internally detect a specific taste or smell. An unusual sensory experience is going on within them to which the rest of the world is oblivious. These people don’t know they are different from anyone else until they discover that no one they know is having these internal experiences.

Synesthesia links the external senses and internal senses, and thus the external world and internal world, in bizarre, unexpected ways. A signal from the external world detected by an external sense triggers a peculiar signal in a different internal sense.

Normally, the external and internal sense circuits are kept separate to prevent hallucinated internal content from being superimposed over real external content. With synesthesia, external sense circuits become linked to different internal sense circuits, producing the curious sensory effects reported by synesthetes. The circuits are not acting independently as they do in normal people. A synesthete can feel or sense two or more things at once, even though only one external signal was received.

One way of explaining how humans developed languages is as a result of sight-sound synesthesia, i.e., every time a person saw a particular object, such as a tree, they heard a specific internal sound tree. They thus formed an intimate connection between the sight and the sound. Whenever they saw a real tree, this sight automatically triggered the word tree as an internal sound. Then, when they deliberately said the word tree to themselves, this triggered the appearance in their mind of a tree, corresponding to what they saw in the external environment. They now had a means to think of trees even if no trees were physically present. In their mind’s eye, they could create an entire internal representation of the visual world just by saying certain words to themselves.

Every time you say a sentence to yourself (you literally hear the sentence in your head even though no one is physically speaking), you also conjure images of what your sentence is about. You are an induced synesthete: you have been trained to link sense signals that would not naturally be connected. After all, there is no reason in nature why you should link the sound tree to a physical tree. Synesthetes, however, would spontaneously have found themselves linking signals that were not naturally linked. They didn’t have to do anything. The process was automatic for them.

Science more or less ignores the fact that we have internal, mental senses since they do not make any sense in terms of materialism. External senses are what you would expect in a strictly material world. But what do internal, mental senses have to do with matter? They are not detecting anything material, yet the mind using them experiences hallucinated material things, such as the things that appear in dreams, as actual material objects.

How can matter hallucinate? Only a mind can do that. But scientists don’t believe in mind. Only matter is real to them. How do they explain internal senses concerned with internal matter (which isn’t matter, but only its simulation)? What possible use could materialism have for two types of matter: external and internal? Where is science’s theory of internal matter? How does Step One of science’s method – observation (namely, external observation, and definitely not internal observation) – apply to matter that people can see only inside their own minds? How can external matter create internal matter which isn’t material? Because that’s what science has to say is going on in order to explain dreams and hallucinations. But if there is only external matter – the central claim of materialism – then how can internal matter, which is actually mental, immaterial, hallucinated matter – exist at all? How can science, a theory of real matter, explain unreal matter, matter subjectively hallucinated by a person which no amount of observation would ever allow a scientist to see inside someone else’s head?

If science is completely wrong about matter, why would it be right about minds, souls, spirits, ghosts?

Arthur Stanley Eddington said, "We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness – the one center where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols. ... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that ... which science is admittedly unable to give. ... Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. ... We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because ‘two’ is ‘one and one’. We forget that we have still to make a study of ‘and’. ... The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness. ... The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds. ... It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference. ... Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine – it is stranger than we can imagine."

Once upon a time, science produced thinkers like Eddington. Now they’re all gone. Science these days generates only materialist, atheistic fanatics and drones. There are no inspirational scientists. None.

Jeremy Dean wrote, Experience of ‘auras’ around people may be the result of a neuropsychological condition called synesthesia. Synesthesia is a fascinating condition which causes a cross-wiring of the senses. ... Rather than being weird, spooky or mystical, it is now a recognized neuropsychological phenomenon which is thought to affect about 4% of the population. Some argue that synesthesia may help to explain the claim that people have auras – a subtle field of energy around them which can be read. It may be that seeing this ‘energy field’ is a type of synesthesia. ... face-color synesthesia results from a crossover between parts of the brain responsible for face processing and color perception.

Synesthesic children may be able to detect ghostly auras (spiritual energies) flitting around them and even resolve them into images of people … dead people. The fact that most people cannot do something does not mean that some people cannot do it. Non-synesthesic people are never going to have the experiences of the synesthete, just as stupid people will never have the experiences of the intelligent.

Young minds, linked to highly synaptically connected young brains, have special abilities. Growing up causes the loss of these abilities since so many synaptic connections fall by the wayside.

Children’s brains are like nuclear reactors undergoing an uncontrolled chain reaction. The process of maturing and becoming adult functions as a set of control rods being inserted into the reactor to slow it down. To be useful, an instrument needs to be controllable. Children’s brains are in a sense out of control, but also full of immense natural power. As control rods are inserted, the child’s brain becomes more stable but also loses many of its former powers.

Young brains have so much potential, yet this potential is rapidly removed via synaptic pruning. It’s essential to expose young children to a healthy environment so that healthy, productive pruning takes place. As it is, most children are subjected to monstrous religious brainwashing by their own parents, and their brains are consequently converted into diseased vectors of diseased religions. Their ability to think rationally and logically is pruned out of existence in order to turn them into religious fanatics, totally infected by irrational faith and emotionalism.

If humanity raised children properly, we could ensure that they left childhood with much higher brainpower. As it is, many of them exit childhood as emotional cripples, religiously traumatized, believing in total nonsense that has become hardwired into them.

Do young children have both stronger senses and more senses? Do they have a highly sensitive sixth sense? Can they communicate with both imaginary friends and real spirits? A child’s sixth sense seems to be lost at around 6 years old. They have to give up their paranormal abilities as they are hit by the double whammy of massive synaptic pruning and the rise of left-hemisphere consciousness which inhibits the paranormal powers of the right hemisphere.

Children are an unknown country. Hardly anything is understood about their true abilities and powers. Many parents report that their young children seem to be psychic and to remember past lives, and so on. Then all of this dries up. The children become normal. That’s because they have passed out of the phase when they had a remarkable connection to the universe, the Collective Unconscious, the Spirit World, and their own past lives.

Children cannot maintain their powers into adulthood. The rise of consciousness, synaptic pruning, hormonal shifts, and transitions in brainwave patterns, all expel the child from Eden and push it into the normal world. Adam and Eve always have to leave paradise to grow up.

The Sixth Sense

The sixth sense is about heightened intuition. Those with this gift are generally called sensitives. The sixth sense is never available to those strongly attached to their five senses. The sixth sense is an advanced vision. It’s non-local vision, extra-sensory vision. The sixth sense is nothing like the local, physical senses which can only detect their immediate, local environment.

People have two modes: 1) the local, physical mode, and 2) the non-local, mental mode. The standard sense organs are local. The senses with special powers are the non-local ones, prime amongst which is intuition.

The World of Infrasound

Infrasound concerns the sound range below audible sound. It’s ultra- low frequency sound.

Although no one can hear it, infrasound still impinges on our body. Is it a ghostly communication channel? Do all sorts of things happen in this sound range that we know nothing about? Do spirits whisper to us? It would drive us crazy if we could hear these things. These are the ghost frequencies. Is infrasound one of the mysterious zones of the sixth sense? Many animals seem to be able to detect infrasound disturbances that presage natural disasters such as earthquakes. Is the earth whispering to them?

Seeing Differently

Children see light differently. If you had a brain like theirs, you would see things differently too. Can you see into the infra-red and ultra-violet regions of light? Is that where ghosts lurk?

Imagine if a slight adjustment to our vision – expanding the range of the frequencies we can see – allowed us to catch glimpses of Spirit World.

There are two types of photoreceptors in the human retina: rods and cones. The rods are simpler. They are responsible for vision at low light levels. This is called scotopic vision, concerning black and white vision. Cones, which are more complex, operate at higher light levels, producing photopic vision, concerning color vision. There are three types of cones: 1) short-wavelength cones, 2) middle-wavelength cones, and 3) long-wavelength cones.

The liminal zone where both rods and cones are operational is called mesopic. Is this a special zone for seeing otherworldly things?

Girls are most likely to see ghosts. Some females are tetrachromatic. Wikipedia says, Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying color information, or possessing four types of cone cell in the eye.

Do the more powerful eyes of children, their superior rods and cones, allow them to detect things invisible to tired, straining, adult eyes? Children see a wider range of frequencies. They also have more open minds, more willingness to accept the unusual, and greater right-hemispheric intuition, imagination and creativity to bring to bear. They don’t have adult tunnel vision. They have not yet become blinkered bigots and groupthinkers. They do not reframe what they see to suit conventional narratives. They actually acknowledge what they see. They see into the infra-red and ultra-violet world of ghosts. They see the dead.

There are those who say good spirits are detected in the ultra-violet region and bad spirits in the infra-red.

Could we use hypnosis to allow everyone to see ghosts? Hypnosis might overcome all the filters that adults use so as not to see anything problematic. In a famous psychological experiment, many people, given a simple counting task regarding a basketball game, failed to notice a man in a gorilla costume beating his chest in the middle of the basketball court. If people can’t even see what’s directly in front of them, what else are they failing to see?

Would parents want to know that their children could see ghosts? Most parents would tell their children never to say any such thing ever again, for fear that they might be considered mentally ill. And so children learn not to see, just as adults don’t see the gorilla right in front of them. They suppress their natural talents to fit in with societal expectations. They don’t want to rock the boat, so they self-suppress their powers.

Parapsychology

Parapsychology is the study of psychic phenomena (telepathy, near-death experiences, synchronicity, precognition, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, psychometry, and so on) and is practiced in parapsychology laboratories. Frances Beroset wrote, The Rhine Center is still one of the leading parapsychology laboratories in the USA. It’s also one of the few left. But there was a time when the laboratory was cutting-edge science and one of Duke University’s claims to international fame. Parapsychology arose from late-19th century English research into communication with the dead and apparitions. In 1930, Duke became the first American university to grant parapsychology a foothold, largely under the leadership of William McDougall. A British eugenicist and well-known social psychologist, McDougall became head of Duke’s psychology department in 1927 and brought with him to Durham two telepathy and clairvoyance researchers, though they were botanists by training: Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife, Louisa E. Rhine.

Rhine proved a pioneering parapsychologist who introduced the term extrasensory perception (ESP), which concerns the ability to glean information from the world without using the local, physical sense organs, which reveal only the immediate surroundings. ESP relies on the non-local, internal senses of the mind.

John G. Kruth, the current Executive Director of the Rhine Center, separates ESP into five categories: 1) telepathy, which concerns mind to mind communication; 2) clairvoyance, which concerns getting information about objects or events from a distance (through space), whether from the next room, or halfway round the world; 3) precognition, which concerns getting information through time, customarily from the future but also sometimes from the past (in which case it is known as retrocognition); 4) psychokinesis, which concerns the mind-matter interaction; how mind can move matter; 5) survival studies, which concerns the persistence of the self outside the body, allowing for an afterlife … physical death is not the end, the mind goes on. Bodies belong to the temporal and contingent order while minds belong to the eternal and necessary order.

Most people cannot grasp that mind is the foundation of existence. Reality is either made of material units or mental units. Scientific materialism is about matter as the basis of existence; ontological mathematics is about mind as the basis of existence. Parapsychology is incompatible with scientific materialism, which is all about local phenomena. Parapsychology is fully compatible with ontological mathematics, which concerns both non-local and local phenomena.

Materialism concerns basic units – atoms (matter atoms) – with mass greater than zero. Idealism concerns basic units – monads (mind atoms) – with a mass of exactly zero.

We can literally define materialism as the exploration of a world without the numbers zero and infinity. Idealism, by contrast, is the study, above all, of zero and infinity, with all other numbers being contained within these two numbers (the boundary numbers).

All numbers between zero and infinity are local; zero and infinity are the basis of non-locality. All numbers between zero and infinity relate to Cartesian extension (material substance); zero and infinity relate to Cartesian non-extension (thinking substance). If all numbers between zero and infinity belonged to a different reality, a different system, from zero and infinity, then that would constitute a Cartesian substance dualism. In fact, all numbers – zero and infinity and everything in between – belong to the same system, hence there is only a substance monism. However, two numbers – zero and infinity – are container numbers, while all other numbers are contained numbers, which sit inside the container numbers. So, although all numbers constitute a monism, this is a monism with two distinct aspects or phases (container and contained, mind and matter, form and content), hence why it can seem like a dualism.

Scientific materialism is a subject which cannot understand zero and infinity – because it cannot assign extension, locality, or observability to them – so paradigmatically excludes them. Anyone who wants to challenge scientific materialism simply needs to go straight to zero and infinity.

Wikipedia says, ‘God of the gaps’ is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God’s existence. God exists in zero and infinity, the gap which science can never cross or fill. Ontological mathematics can be considered as science (locality) plus zero and infinity (non-locality) … matter and mind.

There will come a time in the future when scientists will be baffled that their predecessors deliberately left out zero and infinity (mind) from their account of reality. Zero and infinity are not weird numbers which can be safely omitted from scientific mathematics. They are in fact the basis of existence, the numbers which define eternal and necessary existence and the entire context in which the material world unfolds. The numbers which science studies are those of temporal and contingent existence, but they cannot address the eternal and necessary domain of zero and infinity (Being) which produces the temporal and contingent order within it, as an endless succession of universes (Becomings).

Being contains Becoming. There is no Becoming without Being. A universe doesn’t randomly jump out of non-existence for no reason, as science claims. It comes from inherent existence: Being. But science cannot study inherent existence because inherent existence is immaterial, non-local, dimensionless, holistic, non-entropic, noumenal, and unobservable, hence it is beyond the reach of the scientific method and paradigm.

Pythagoras said, All is number (or God is number). God is zero and infinity. Creation is all numbers in-between. To say that God created the universe out of nothing (ex nihilo) is to say that all other numbers are contained within zero and infinity and can be projected – as a local, spacetime world of matter – within a non-local, non-spacetime, immaterial domain of mind.

Scientists never ask what the universe is contained within. It’s contained within mind, within zero and infinity. Scientists regard the universe as pure externality. In fact, the universe is internal to mind, exactly as a dream is internal to the mind of the dreamer.

Nietzsche said, As long as you still experience the stars as something above you, you lack the eye of knowledge. Every star exists inside the Cosmic Mind, inside God. God is the collection of all monadic minds, and all stars come from monads. We, the monads, are the Star Makers! We are not made from stars. Stars are made from us. We are the real glittering stars illuminating the universe.

Reality is all about numbers. Once you understand the properties of numbers, you understand reality. The two numbers that have most baffled humanity are zero and infinity. These are none other than the keys to understanding and explaining existence. These are God.

Mathematics is both the numerical language and numerical substance of the universe. Numbers exist. They exist as sinusoidal waves = basis thoughts = the constituents of monadic minds. Everything is made of numbers. All things are numbers. Number rules all. It’s all in the math.

Seeing Auras

Some individuals claim to see auras. The aura, an esoteric phenomenon, is a supposed energy field, a colorful luminous radiation surrounding a person, imperceptible to others. The special individuals who see auras are typically emotional synesthetes. In synesthetes, brain regions responsible for processing different types of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected (cross-wired). Some synesthetes, when they see a person, also see a particular color or aura associated with them.

Synesthetes have more synaptic connections than regular folk, or higher concentrations of synaptic connections in unusual areas, linking senses that would not normally be linked. These extra connections or enhanced connections produce associations between brain areas that do not normally communicate with each other. With face-color synesthesia, the brain region responsible for facial recognition links to the color-processing brain region: different faces are associated with unique colors. There are many other such synesthesic pairings, and even combinations involving all five of the senses.

With touch-mirror synesthesia, when the synesthete observes a person being touched, they experience the same. For example, if the synesthete sees a person being touched on the right shoulder, they too feel a sensation of being touched on the right shoulder.

Synesthetes with a combination of touch-mirror synesthesia and face-color synesthesia can read another’s pain astonishingly well. When the person is in emotional distress or in physical pain, this is reflected in their aura, which undergoes color changes, showing that they have moved away from their normal health.

Children, as their brains are maturing, may go through a strongly synesthesic phase. Some children may be highly attuned to auras. Might they even see the auras, the fading energy, the spiritual echo, of the dead?

Is there a reason why girls should be particularly able to see the auras of spirits? One possibility, as we have seen, is the condition of tetrachromacy, which is restricted to females. Newcastle University’s Tetrachromacy Project says, Tetrachromacy is an enhanced type of color vision that may allow the individual to see colors that others cannot. Normal color vision depends on three types of specialized cells in the eye called cones. These cones are often referred to as blue, green and red cones depending on the particular wavelengths of light that trigger them into action. In comparison, tetrachromats are endowed with a fourth type of cone, which is most sensitive in the yellow-green region of the visible spectrum. Where does the fourth cone type come from? The red and green cones are coded by genes lying on the X chromosome. These genes are very similar and are prone to errors during early development of a fetus. 6% of men carry an anomalous gene which produces a different red or a different green cone. We call them anomalous trichromats, because their color vision is slightly different from normal. 2% of men have either no red or no green cones, because the genetic error was more severe. We call these men dichromats as their color vision relies on only two types of cone. The blue cones are coded by a gene on chromosome 7 and are rarely subject to genetic errors. A woman, who has two X chromosomes, can carry the normal red and green genes on one of her X chromosomes and an anomalous gene on her other. This genetic pattern enables her to express four types of cone. 12% of women carry such an altered gene, but we do not know how many of these women can use their additional cone type to make color discriminations that are unachievable for the rest of us. The best way to tell whether a woman carries the gene is if she has a son (or father) with a slight color anomaly (i.e., very mild color blindness). We can predict with some confidence that the milder the son’s (or father’s) color anomaly, the better chance there is for the mother (or daughter) to see the world in different colors.

Tetrachromatic women do not see in red, green, and blue like everyone else. They see in four colors: red, green, blue, and yellow-green. Their tetrachromatic color vision is to normal trichromatic color vision as trichromatic color vision is to dichromatic (two-color) color vision, the latter constituting a version of color blindness. All people with normal color vision, are, in comparison with tetrachromats, suffering from a type of color blindness.

Can tetrachromats, with their enhanced color vision, see all kinds of things that the rest of us can’t see? Most people have taken a simple test for color blindness. A standard test involves a series of pictures, each containing a circle of dots randomized in color and size. Within the pattern are dots forming a number, which is difficult or impossible for those with red-green color blindness to see, but which people with normal color vision can see easily. So, people with normal color vision can extract from the environment meaningful signals not visible to those with defective color vision. This immediately raises the possibility of tetrachromats seeing signals to which the rest of us are blind. Could some of these signals relate to auras and spirits? Synesthesic tetrachromats would be those best able to see ghostly auras.

Tetrachromatic artist Concetta Antico said, I see colors in other colors. Other people might just see white light, but I see orange and yellow and pink and green, so white is not white; white is all varieties of white.

While trichromats can see about 1 million colors, tetrachromats can see an amazing 100 million colors.

The average person has three different types of cones that divide up visual color information into red, green, and blue signals. Tetrachromats