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Aura is vascular tone

The opposite of aura is cringe, breaking frame, tanha. But in the most literal physiological sense, the opposite of aura is vascular microspasm. The more sharp jitter in someone’s vasculature, the worse their aura is.

Vascular microspasm is an honest signal across multiple domains; one such domain is health. Muscle physiology is somewhat counter-intuitive in that relaxation is more difficult than contraction[1]. The relaxed state is a highly ordered state, and getting a muscle to relax requires energy input to create this order — much like rolling a heavy stone up a hill. Contraction happens automatically as this cellular structure is disturbed. And so if we don’t have enough energy flowing through our system, our muscles will be unstable, unable to reliably reach & maintain full relaxation. (It takes energy, health, and skill to fully relax — it requires swimming against the thermodynamic current, it is not the default, it does not ‘just happen’.)

Vascular microspasm is also a sign of weakly held beliefs. Vasocomputation says that we hold neural priors (restrictions in neural dynamic range) in vascular tension; when the neural system doesn’t naturally flow into safe and predictive patterns, the vasomuscular system jumps in to micromanage[2]. When this happens, “vascular tone” — the baseline tension & rhythmic potential of the vascular system — gets noisy. If we zoom in, we’d see tiny jitters across our vascular muscles as we change priors.

But if we’re constantly readjusting our priors, our vascular tone will stay noisy because our system never fully irons out interactions between them, and we’re more likely to change priors again. I think we pick up on subtle behavioral & physiological cues to ‘feel’ this noise in others and take it as a sign of untrustworthiness.

Third, vascular microspasm is a sign of whether someone is running good cognitive-emotional-social software. Upon encountering a new idea, our primary criterion for whether we should believe it is “what would happen to my aura if I ran this idea-as-software on my nervous system? Would this wreck me?” — and a safe proxy for this is to look at the nervous system of someone who’s running it. The more microspasms we feel, the less interested in copying their nervous system software we are — if we wouldn’t want to be them, we’re less likely to believe their new idea. More generally, we find microspasms in others unpleasant because we automatically mirror tension; if someone is full of tension or spasms we tend to limit contact lest we also microspasm.[3]

Finally, vascular microspasms are a decent proxy for how many latches (long-term frozen priors) someone is carrying. Latches are both result & cause of spasmodic reflexes; more latches = more microspasm.

Female intuition is especially sensitive to all forms of microspasm; often this intuition doesn’t differentiate between these domains and simply offers an aggregate “ick” score. But there can be alpha in figuring out where the microspasms are coming from — does this guy have questionable aura because he’s hiding something or because he got mindkilled by politics or because he’s hypothyroid?

Although aura generally gives a hard-to-fake (aggregate) signal across these domains, it’s also a common target for hacking: alcohol, beta blockers, and sociopathy all decrease microspasm. The peaters have perhaps the most hopeful story: lack of aura is lack of energy flow, and if you fix your metabolism you’ll automatically fix your aura. There exists a high-aura version of everyone; sometimes it’s just latent.

Should vascular tone really be our default arbiter of strength, truth, and beauty? I don’t make the rules, but as a ruthless simple system it’s more clever than it looks.

How to improve aura?

Every single item on Veronica’s list is either likely to reduce vascular microspasms, or is simply a direct symptom of having them (e.g. stuttering). I’d add
- The importance of practicing smooth movements: as you do anything, so you do everything.
- Muscles benefit from exercise; mental muscles do too. My sense is that good ways to exercise compound mental movements are regular and varied social interaction, time in nature, and longform reading.
- One of Buddhism’s core claims is we repetitively do a spasm-like motion towards most sensations to try to control them, and it feels really good when we learn how to stop doing this. Reducing tanha will reliably improve aura.
- Reducing rumination (repetitively ‘cold-working’ a prediction to make it sticky) will help for similar reasons.

A lot of successful life change is a question of where to get the initial energy for the change. My answer tends to be diet; in the era we find ourselves in, feeling a little better can often be a matter of simply not eating things that actively make us feel bad.

Refs:
[1] Pollack 1990, Muscles and Molecules: Uncovering the Principles of Biological Motion [builds off Ling & Szent-Gyorgyi's work]
[2] Johnson 2023, Principles of Vasocomputation
[3] Friston & Frith 2015(x2) make the argument that all communication relies on generalized synchrony; I expect humans' special capacity for communication to partly rely on our capacity and propensity to finely match tension patterns. This has upsides & downsides