Tag: Brain

ASMR Does Something Weird To Our Brains | Answers With Joe

If you’ve been on the internet for more than 5 minutes, you’ve probably heard of ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It’s the weird – but pleasant – sensation some people get from certain trigger sounds or sensations. It’s sparked an entire industry of content, but it’s still a bit of a mystery. Let’s try to get to the bottom of it.

TRANSCRIPT:

It’s been called The Tingles, Whisper Porn, even Brain Orgasms. And much like regular orgasms, some people just can’t have them.It’s been called The Tingles, Whisper Porn, even Brain Orgasms. And much like regular orgasms, some people just can’t have them.
So I’ve been told. By some girlfriends.
It’s called ASMR, and if you haven’t heard of it, well, welcome to the internet.

It’s a sensation that people have probably felt for thousands of years, but it was only after the internet came along that millions of people looked at each other and said, “Oh, you too?”
ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” and it was coined by a woman named named Jennifer Allen in 2010.
She was part of a Reddit thread that was trying to get to the bottom of the phenomenon. And it kinda stuck. It was a clinical-sounding name designed to make it easier to talk about but also make it sound more legitimate to researchers. Not to mention negate associations with sexual fetishism. Because it’s not a sexual thing, even though they call it “whisper porn” and “brain orgasms,” and… every search result you get.

Dr. Craig Richard, from Shenandoah University in Virginia is an ASMR expert and created an online resource called ASMR University.
He’s also the author of the book Brain Tingles where he describes ASMR as:

“… a deeply relaxing feeling often accompanied by light and pleasurable brain tingles. It’s often stimulated during moments of positive, personal attention from a kind or caring person whispering, speaking, acting, and moving in a gentle way. It may be likely that about 10-20% of the global population is able to experience ASMR.”
Up until 2010, ASMR was sometimes called “The Unnamed Feeling,” “Weird Head Sensation,” and “Attention Induced Euphoria.”
It was also called “(head)tingle(s),” “head orgasm, and “braingasm.”

A person going by the screen name WhisperingLife uploaded the first, intentional ASMR video to YouTube in 2009.
It’s called “Whisper 1 — hello,” and it consists of a black screen and a lo-fi, whispered recording of her talking about making a YouTube channel specifically for whispering.
Since then, ASMR content has exploded online. When researching this video, a Google search brought up 244 million videos.

So you’re watching the 244 million and first video ever uploaded about ASMR.
It’s even making its way into mainstream commercials.
Hershey’s Chocolate Co. released an almost 90-minute online video titled “Reese The Movie: An ASMR Experience” in 2019.
The company brought together five popular ASMR creators to sit at a round table in an orange room and take turns whispering about the candy, along with crinkling its wrappers and eating the peanut butter cups.
Michelob Ultra ran a commercial during the Super Bowl in 2019 that had Zoe Kravitz whispering into a microphone and tapping her fingernails against a bottle.

So, how does ASMR work? What happens on a physiological level when it’s triggered? 

ASMR isn’t experienced by everyone. But for those who do, it usually starts in childhood.
Like you might feel tingles when your head was checked for lice or fingers running through your hair.
Or maybe you felt tingles when someone would trace a finger across your back.  (which to me doesn’t sound that strange, doesn’t everybody get a shiver?)

There are also consistencies in ASMR triggers. These include

Like some people have trouble experiencing them in clinical lab situations. For obvious reasons.
Its’ also kinda hard to determine whether people are having “true” ASMR experiences.
Regardless, there’ve been several studies over the last few years that look into the personalities of those who can experience it.
To better understand what happens to the brain, Dr. Richard and co-researchers had 10 participants watch ASMR videos in an fMRI machine for a study in 2018.
The participants’ brains showed significant activation in areas associated with reward and emotional arousal.
Brain activation also showed similarities to patterns observed in musical frisson, also known as music chills because of a chills-down-the-spine sensation.
As Dr. Richard told National Geographic in March 2022:

“[The study] showed that specific areas of the brain are active when someone is experiencing ASMR. Some of these regions highlight the likely involvement of dopamine and oxytocin.”
Oxytocin is sometimes called the “love hormone.” Behaviors that trigger oxytocin release are similar to behaviors that trigger ASMR.
Oxytocin can also stimulate states of relaxation and comfort, which are similar to ASMR feelings. 
Another study in 2017 focused on the default mode network (DMN) of the brain.

This gets a little in the weeds but the default mode network is made up of several modules in your brain and it’s kind-of on when you’re not.
Like if you’re focusing on a task, something external, then the network is less active. But if you’re kinda relaxed and looking inward; thinking – being introspective, that’s when it becomes more active.

And in this study, they measured the DMN activity of 11 people who could experience ASMR and 11 people who can’t. And they found that there was less functional connectivity in people who can experience ASMR.
In other words, all those different modules that make up the DMN had weaker connections in the ASMR group. Possibly making it easier for certain sensory stimuli to kinda short it out.
But they also found higher connectivity in certain parts of the brain that manage executive control and visual resting-state networks.

To put all that together into some sexy science speak:

The researchers suggest that it’s possible that “ASMR reflects a reduced ability to inhibit sensory-emotional experiences that are suppressed in most individuals.”

In other words, it might be something that we all feel, but for most of us it gets suppressed in the brain.
The researchers made sure to point out this doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with people who experience ASMR, it’s not a mental disorder or anything. In fact, it may be actually be helpful as a tool to cope with depression or stress.
Speaking of coping, two studies published in PLOS ONE in 2018 looked into the physiological benefits of the ASMR experience, especially when watching videos.

One of the two studies showed reduced heart rates and increased skin conductance levels and said it could be “a reliable and physiologically-rooted experience that may have therapeutic benefits for mental and physical health.”
The researchers specifically noted in both studies that ASMR is not associated with sexual arousal.

As the researchers wrote:
“This misconception may arise from the often interpersonal and intimate nature of some ASMR videos, but our research indicates that sexual arousal is not a reliable outcome of watching ASMR videos.”
The boobs in the thumbnails are just a bonus I guess.

Then there’s a new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality in April 2022 focused on sensitivity.
The study looked at 500 people and showed that people who experience ASMR scored significantly higher on tests involving  external hypersensitivity and body perception.
But as one of the researchers pointed out, this does have a downside. Saying:

“Highly sensitive people may be able to experience intensely pleasurable feelings like ASMR but this high sensitivity also has downsides. For example, the noise of a pen clicking or someone chewing gum could set off a negative reaction, which others would simply ignore.”
There is actually a term for what could be considered the opposite of ASMR, misophonia, where you experience discomfort or disgust at certain sounds.
Another study from February 2022 suggests ASMR experiencers may be more neurotic and have more baseline anxiety than non- experiencers.
This suggests that they may be more prone to experiencing negative emotional states as well as anxiety disorders. The good news is that they suggest the ASMR experience can help mitigate that.
One last study worth mentioning was published in Frontiers of Psychology in 2017 that focused on personality traits.

They studied 290 ASMR experiencers and 290 controls and found that the ASMR group demonstrated higher scores on Openness-to-Experience and Neuroticism and lower levels of Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness when compared to the controls.
In other words, introverts may be more likely to have them.

They said:
“It may be that inward looking people are more likely to experience ASMR symptoms than more sociable, outward looking people. Alternatively, the ASMR symptoms may lead people to be less sociable and more introspective.”

Little bit of a chicken and egg thing there but especially if the hypersensitivity to stimuli thing is true, then yeah, I can imagine those people preferring to be in a more relaxed, quiet setting.
So, what are we to make of all of this? ASMR is non-sexual… (thumbnails) really… some people who experience it may have more anxiety than others, may be more introverted than others, but the experience is a beneficial one for them.

Also, ASMR could be triggering memories from infancy.
In fact, Dr. Richard thinks the quality that is underneath almost all ASMR videos is a “tranquil, womb-like intimacy.”

He believes that sounds like towel folding and whispering are about triggering the experience of being loved.
When his study participants were asked how they most prefer to experience ASMR outside of videos, they ranked receiving light touches with their eyes closed first.

Sound triggers were ranked second, and visual ones below that.
And he points out that interestingly, this is how our senses develop over time.

When you’re born, you receive most of your information about the world through touch. Parents often coddle and stroke their newborns.
So, ASMR could be an experience of reliving your newborn time.

As Dr. Richard told Smithsonian Magazine in 2017:
“The reason people can get tingles and feel relaxed and comforted listening to Maria GentleWhispering is because she’s acting very much the way a parent would care for you, with the caring glances, gentle speech and soothing hand movements.”

This is classic pattern recognition. Our brains recognize the pattern of someone who cares, and that comforts us. And it activates that oxytocin that makes us feel good.
Maybe that’s what it’s all about – feeling loved and cared for. After all the studies, all the theories, all the debates, it’s really just the deep down universal human need to feel loved.
So if you are into ASMR content and someone tries to give you crap for it, you’ve got the perfect comeback.

So, do you experience ASMR? If so, what’s your trigger? Or misophonia? Anything weird you can’t stand to hear?
My little weird thing is when people wear thong sandals and they kinda slap the bottom of their feet as they walk…  I don’t know why, I hate it. Just… (react)
But either way, if you do enjoy a good brain tingle, I say go for it.  Life is hard, times are tough, self care is important.

 

Apparently “Mind Blindness” Is A Thing

 

What do you “see” in your mind’s eye? Is it as real as looking at a photo? Or do you not see any images at all? It turns out there are 3-5% of the population who don’t have the ability to form images in their heads. It’s a condition called “Imagination blindness” or Aphantasia, and it was only recently discovered.

 

Along with Aphantasia is the opposite end of the spectrum, Hyperphantasia, where the mind’s eye is so vivid, it’s hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s imagination.

It opens up a lot of questions about how we see and perceive our world.

 

I want to start this video with a little exercise. So if you don’t mind playing along with me, here’s what I want to do…

I want you to imagine a dog. Any dog. Just whenever I say the word “dog” what comes to mind? And then I want you to go into the comments and describe what you see in as much detail as possible. Go ahead and pause the video, take your time, just what do you see when I ask you to imagine a dog.

 

Go ahead. (wait a beat. Eat something)

 

All right, so some of you will have described a very specific dog, specific color, hair length, size, age, maybe it’s even doing something like panting or sleeping or running.

A certain percentage of comments might describe it exactly like looking at a photograph or a video.

 

For others, the description might be of a vague dog, no specifics really but still a dog.

And of course most of those comments will describe your mom.

 

But if recent studies are any indicator, there’s about three to five percent of you that weren’t able to visualize anything at all. Maybe didn’t even understand the question.

Because it turns out that some people don’t have a mind’s eye.

 

This inability to visualize in your mind’s eye is a condition called aphantasia. It’s also known as “image-free thinking.”

Those who have aphantasia are unable to create images in their minds of people, places, and objects.

 

On the complete opposite end is a condition experienced by 10 to 15 percent of people called hyperphantasia.

That’s when someone has extremely vivid visualizations in the mind’s eye.

https://aphantasia.com/what-is-aphantasia/

 

[Basic definitions:
Aphantasia = no ability to create visuals in your mind’s eye
Hyperphantasia = inability to turn off the visuals in your mind’s eye]

To be clear, it’s not simply that some people have one or the other and some don’t. It’s a spectrum.

According to Dr. Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter in Britain, “This is not a disorder as far as I can see,” “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.”

 

And Dr. Zeman should know because he coined the term a-phantasia. Phantasia being the Latin word for fantasy or imagination. So, A-phantasia is someone who is without that.

He coined this phrase in 2015 after meeting a patient he named “MX” who could no longer imagine after undergoing heart surgery.

 

After telling the patient’s story to the media, people started coming out of the woodwork to say that yeah, they can’t do that either.

And this is when things got interesting because it turns out this is a relatively common experience, but people didn’t really talk about it because they didn’t realize their experience was any different than anybody else’s.

 

We just kind of assume that other people’s experience of imagining things is similar to our own, so we don’t question it. It kind-of took someone losing it for us to know that it was something you could be without.

 

Although it wasn’t totally out of the blue. British psychologist Francis Galton first reported similar cases way back in 1880.

He conducted a study where he asked 100 participants to imagine their breakfast tables. Twelve people claimed to have very dim mental images or no imagery at all.

 

But this research was practically ignored for more than a hundred years until Zeman came along with MX’s story.

Now even though the term “aphantasia” technically means “without imagination”, that’s not really what’s going on here.

 

People with aphantasia can still be imaginative and experience the world fully. They just don’t do it with what we might call a “mind’s eye”.

In fact, they’re probably really good at knowing facts, but struggle with episodic memory and remembering faces.

 

When asked to describe his fiancee, one person told the BBC in 2015 that he can think about her, that she’s brunette, and that she has her hair up at the back.

“But I’m not describing an image I am looking at,” he said. “I’m remembering features about her, that’s the strangest thing…”

 

In other words, some people with aphantasia can recall things they’ve seen, but it’s memory and not imagination.

Also, it’s not just visual images. Fairly recently it swept social media that some people have an inner monologue and some people don’t. That’s a kind of aphantasia.

For what it’s worth I don’t just have a monologue, I have a dialogue. Between multiple characters. My brain’s basically a Monty Python sketch. And I personally can’t imagine how someone could function without that, but a lot of people do and that’s super interesting to me.

 

Actually my writer Jason, when he was researching this topic, he found out that a member of his improv group has aphantasia.

He said that he kind-of has an inner monologue, but it’s just a string of words, unless he imagines it in like an actor’s voice, then it’s like his thoughts have a narrator. And as for images, he says he can remember a similar image and extrapolate from that, but to put it in computer terms, images are more like a database entry with various qualities of the image listed but the link to the image is broken.

 

And this is a common thing I ran across researching this, that people with aphantasia can recall various details of an image but it just doesn’t form an actual image in their minds. Now to switch to the other side of the spectrum for a second, someone with hyperphantasia might see pictures in their mind so vivid that they can have trouble telling the difference between imagination and reality.

 

In fact, for some people the visualization in their mind is more visceral and affecting than looking at an actual image.

The artist Clare Dudeney described this in an interview with Science Focus in 2019, saying, “When people describe some terrible accident, I visualise it so strongly that I feel it’s happening to me.” She added, “I can watch gruesome things on TV and be fine, but a passage in a book can bring to mind such vivid images that I faint.”

 

Honestly, I might be closer to that than I am to aphantasia. Sometimes I’ll be daydreaming and maybe I’ll imagine trying to catch something and I’ll knock things off my table. Happened a lot when I was a kid in school actually, I got stared at a lot.

 

[It’s not just a “some people have it and some don’t” scenario. It’s a spectrum and on one extreme is aphantasia and hyperphantasia on the other. Most people fall somewhere in the middle.

It was only given a name recently when (details in the TED talk) someone had a brain injury and they noticed they couldn’t visualize afterwards.
It’s not something that was understood to be a thing because people don’t question how they experience the world; we just assume everyone experiences it like we do. It took someone losing it to know what it’s like to not have it.

How people with aphantasia and hyperphantasia experience the world]

 

But like Dr. Zeman said earlier in the video, this isn’t a cognitive ailment by any means, there are pros and cons to both extremes of the spectrum.

 

Some of the positive traits for aphantasia include:

– High abstract reasoning
– Increased concentration skills
– Being more present in the moment

Some disadvantages include:

– Unable to dream in pictures
– Inability to imagine the faces of loved ones who have passed away
– Being lost when someone describes something you haven’t seen or experienced

For hyperphantasia, the pros may include:

– Seeing everything vividly in your head
– Ability to plan things in more detail
– Resuming dreams after waking up

And the challenges may include:

– Seeing everything vividly in your head
– Reliving situations over and over in your head
– Losing focus

 

In fact some have argued that people with aphantasia are better able to deal with traumatic experiences because they don’t recall it as vividly and immediately as other people do.

Whereas someone with hyperphantasia might be more prone to conditions like PTSD because every time they remember the trauma it’s like it’s happening all over again. So if you have aphantasia, you might be more likely to work in scientific or mathematical professions than other people, you might have a natural leg up in those areas.

 

Which might make you ask, where do you land on this spectrum, what natural abilities might you have because of it? Well, there are several tests to help determine that. British psychologist David Marks developed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) in 1973. Researchers refer to it most often when they study imagery extremes like aphantasia and hyperphantasia.

 

The test includes four scenarios in which you’re asked to rank how vividly you can see them in your mind. The scenarios include imagining a loved one’s face, a favorite store, or a pretty landscape. The one-to-five ratings go from “no image at all” to “perfectly realistic.”

 

Another evaluation is the Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale (SUIS), which measures general occurrences of imagery in daily life. It consists of twelve scenarios and uses a five-point rating scale. A Dutch version uses nine scenarios.
https://psyarxiv.com/j2h8k/download

 

SUIS doesn’t measure the auditory part I mentioned earlier, the inner monologue thing, it only focuses on visual imagery. SUIS is concerned with the frequency and likelihood of mental imagery, compared to the VVIQ that focuses on the vividness and quality of mental images.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4538780/

 

There’s also the Object-Spatial Imagery Questionnaire (OSIQ), which was created to evaluate individual differences in visual imagery experiences and preferences.

 

It has two scales:

– Object imagery, which evaluates preferences for processing and representing colorful, high-res, and pictorial images of specific objects
– Spatial imagery, which evaluates preferences for processing and representing relations among objects, spatial transformations, and schematic images

 

Binocular rivalry is another way to measure mental imagery. This process investigates the neural mechanisms of perceptual awareness. Visual perception alternates between our eyes during binocular rivalry when we’re presented with two different fields of view. The back and forth of perception relies on the strength of inhibitory interactions between neuronal groups in the visual cortex.

 

Studies using binocular rivalry priming have shown that aphantasia is more due to a lack of sensory imagery and not a lack of metacognition. That was a lot of big words and I think it broke me. I’ll put links to all these tests down in the description if you want to go see where you lie on this scale.

 

Pros and cons of aphantasia and hyperphantasia

A few things that stood out was that it’s possible people with aphantasia might handle traumatic experiences better because they can’t visualize them whereas people with average or hyperphantasia relive bad memories over and over more vividly. However, being unable to visualize in your mind might make some types of work impossible (TED talk mentions architect)

 

Types of tests to see where you are on the mind’s eye spectrum:

VVIQ
SUIS
OSIQ
Binocular rivalry

 

But hold on a second, if we experience visuals in our “mind’s eye” so differently, does that apply to how we see things in general? Like how does our brain process visuals in the first place?

 

Here’s a brief rundown.

The optic nerve travels to two places, the thalamus and the superior colliculus, which helps determine where our eyes and head move. Visual input then travels to the visual cortex from the thalamus. The visual cortex is located at the back of our brains. It’s where the building blocks of vision are combined to produced perception.

 

Researchers believe that visual processing occurs through two information streams:

– Where Pathway – which deals with object movement and location
– What Pathway – which recognizes and identifies objects

 

But the visual cortex can be divided into several distinct sub-regions, with simple visual features located in lower areas and more complex features in higher areas. The primary visual cortex is at the bottom, and it’s sensitive to basic visual signals like object orientation and direction. The next area up responds to contours, textures, and if something is in the background or foreground.

 

After this area, the pathways carrying What and Where information split up into specific brain areas. For example, the inferior temporal cortex that represents complete objects is located at the top of the What hierarchy. There is even a part of this cortex called the fusiform face area that specifically responds to faces.

 

But this bottom-up approach to processing vision is slow. That’s why the brain also relies on top-down mechanisms to process visuals.

Since a lot of information gets lost by the time it reaches the brain, our brains construct reality for us based on past experiences and stored information. Top-down mechanisms affect things like attention, object expectation, scene segmentation, and working memory.

 

The entire visual pathway, except for the retina, is influenced by top-down mechanisms. Knowing this, how do we create images in our heads? In other words, how does imagination work in our brains?

 

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 helps answer this. The study’s researchers analyzed multiple patterns of fMRI data and discovered it wasn’t just the visual cortex alone that contributed to imagination.

 

There were twelve “regions of interest” also involved. Brain areas like the cerebellum, the medial frontal cortex, and the precuneus helped create a “mental workplace” to create imagined people, places, and things.

 

People with aphantasia who have difficulty imagining things may have had it their whole lives, or it was brought on by a medical or psychological condition. Another reason people with aphantasia might not be able to visualize may be due to cortical excitability.

 

In other words, how sensitive the neurons are in your frontal cortex. In a study published in eLife in 2020, scientists discovered that the less excitable someone’s visual cortex is, the more vivid their mind’s eye. “When we found that cortical excitability was negatively correlated with imagery strength, we were at first surprised,” lead researcher Rebecca Keogh told Aphantasia Network. “But as all of the other experiments started to line up showing the same trend, we became excited that we had found a potential underlying mechanism that explains individual difference in imagery ability.”

 

The researchers conducted further studies and arrived at a theory that those who have hyperphantasia either have a not-excitable visual cortex, an excitable prefrontal cortex, or both. And those who have aphantasia have a more excitable visual cortex, a less excitable prefrontal cortex, or both.

 

And I said before, this experience varies across individuals. And it’s not one or the other, it’s a whole spectrum.

[Any research into how we create visuals in our brains (Reticular Activating System?) and why on a physical level some people can’t do it

Inner monologue similar – some people have it and some don’t.

My own experience (might do one of these tests on myself and see what I get. I feel like I lean toward hyperphantasia)]

 

For me this is just further proof that how we see the world is unique in so many ways. I mean we’re literally over here talking about how we visualize the world differently.

 

And maybe now that we understand the “phantasia” spectrum, it can open up conversations about how we see things differently. Maybe this is the beginning of a new era of understanding and celebrating our different worldviews.

 

Any day now. Any day now that could happen.

3 Ways Your Mind Lies To You

Cognitive biases. We all have them. But we only seem to notice them in other people. Today we’re looking at 3 of the most prevalent and destructive cognitive biases that we all have, and what we can do to prevent them from negatively impacting ourselves and our society.

How Music Hacks The Brain

Music is a universal language. It kind-of makes us human. But why? Why does every culture around the world understand music? The answer may lie in what it does in our brains.

From mood regulation to immune system support, listening to music has measurable physiological effects on us. And learning to play music creates real differences in our brain structures that improve cognitive performance in several areas.

Some even argue that the development of music thousands of years ago shaped our species into what we are today, so let’s take a look at music, the most human thing we do.

Your Brain’s Incredible Healing Powers

The placebo effect is the phenomenon of your body responding to a treatment even if it’s not real. It happens so much, so strongly, and so often that it has to be factored in to any medical study.

It speaks to the amazing ability of the brain to physiologically change the body in surprising ways.

How To Hack Your Memory

Memory champions are capable of seemingly superhuman feats of memory, but it’s something we can all do – if you know a few tricks.

Also if you’re on Netflix, check out the documentary Memory Games.

Is Your Consciousness Just A Bunch Of Vibrations?

How does non-conscious matter create consciousness? The “hard problem of consciousness” is a question that has plagued philosophers, psychologists, and neurosurgeons for centuries. A new theory suggests it’s all about vibrations and synchronicity. It’s called The General Resonance Theory of Consciousness.

Does Your Mind Create The Universe?

Get a free month of CuriosityStream if you go to http://www.curiositystream.com/joescott!

In 2005, Robert Lanza introduced the theory of Biocentrism to the world. Using quantum mechanics and tests like the double-slit experiment, he argues that consciousness creates the universe and not the other way around

Everything Is Memory

Today we go a little deeper and talk about the mystery of memory.
Check out Cheddar at their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC04K…

From Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to The Matrix, we’ve believed that reality is not exactly what we experience. Can that be because of the fact that we are all living in our own simulations – the conscious experience that our brain creates.

And this imagined reality creates the beliefs that we cling to and create our worldview around.

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