The Strange Science of ASMR - Doctor Goes In Search of Tingles

this video is supported by curiosity stream and the streaming platform i co-founded nebula stay tuned till the end to find out how to get both for only 15 for a year but also to experience my own attempt at asmr which you definitely do not want to miss now i've been using youtube for a decade or so now and making videos seriously on here for about two years but ensconced in my little educational youtube bubble i've managed to avoid a lot of the stranger corners of the platform one term i was familiar with for a long time was asmr but my sole example of it was a video of an extremely attractive woman dressed as a doctor frankly molesting a microphone in what i inferred to be a seductive way i thought this is weird and cringy and if i wanted to watch good looking people dress up as healthcare professionals and make noises well there are other websites for that but recently i was looking for a clinical skills video in medicine this is what we call a tutorial video about some examination or something like that examining the heart the eyes cranial nerves you know you get the idea and most of these videos are pretty niche they're really only going to be looked up by medical students or junior doctors but i noticed some had a lot of views like a lot millions what was going on so i investigated some of them weren't even uploaded by medical channels but by asmr channels for those of you only vaguely as familiar with asmr as i was a few weeks ago you might be asking hang on what actually is it asmr as a term was only coined about 10 or 12 years ago and it stands for autonomous sensory meridian response it can be defined in several different ways but generally regarded as a relaxing or enjoyable feeling perhaps accompanied by a tingling sensation often described around the head triggers can be varied but frequently includes speaking softly personal care pleasant sounds and many more intentional asmr in terms of youtube video making is where you people set out to make videos to generate the desired effect whereas unintentional asmr is where viewers derive the same pleasurable experience from a video of a process that has some other purpose as far as i can tell the difference between the intentional and unintentional asmr crowds is the third biggest divide in humanity since the great schism of 11th century christianity closely followed by the violent civil war of yani and laurel examples of unintentional smr that i found include suit fitting hair styling makeup application ear cleaning head lice checks what the hell videos from familiar faces like bob rogers like bob ross or fred rogers calmly speaking and of course lots and lots of medical checkups like a woodland animal discovering a furry convention i was confused by all these people dressing up like me and doing kinky things now i know that a frequent complaint from the asmr community is that it's labeled as a sexual thing when it isn't and i accept that but doctors just don't look like this frankly we're not this good looking let's take a look through all these medical asmr checkups you can clearly see that there is a gender bias here aha finally some representation for us marginalized minority men wow medical checkups in space i mean some of these are pretty inventive cranial nerve exams are very popular they involve the head which is a common sort of asmr trigger so that makes sense and our eyes are just not producing enough oil these days wait a second what the f are you taking the piss well actually it seems like quite another bodily fluid that she's after jazzy asmr i mean she maybe looks like she could be indian perhaps so um you know she probably is a doctor in real life now i know this isn't a medical asmr video and there are many weird and wacky asmr videos that i could pick on out there but when looking for personal care asmr i found this work of art is really the only way i can describe it isn't it wonderful which i had to share yes it's shrek boyfriend role play when i see something like this i do wonder if the pandemic really was actually punishment sent down by the gods for humanity hath strayed from the divine path and into depravity and no longer deserves to enjoy earth's bounties now i don't want to sound like i'm hating on the intentional asmr medical crowd it's just not for me i'm sure they'd understand why a doctor would find it hard to watch someone talk medical gibberish if i wanted to do that i could just watch the resident but then again if you consider the unintentional asmr i mean i've always quite enjoyed watching artisan videos a master crafts person sculpting or carving a work of art but i don't know if i'm just appreciating their expertise and a nice video is that asmr one of the difficult things about studying asmr is that it's quite hard to define what it is and whether it's the same to different people and in my opinion this can lead to very problematic content being shrugged off as asmr when it should be looked at objectively as harmful mukbang channels where people glamorize disordered binge eating and waste appalling amounts of food are sometimes justified under the asmr category although i can't imagine what is relaxing about watching or worse hearing people eating like they've been starved for days chiropractors cracking joints is a hugely popular genre of video that people overwhelmingly describe as satisfying but these sensationless videos of patients that have come to the practitioners for help but instead find their medical problem the centerpiece of pseudoscientific theatre theater inculcate acceptance of quackery chiropractic has no basis in science and has never been shown to be superior to physical therapy surprisingly for something so prevalent online there's not much research focusing on it but one of the leading scientists looking into asmr is dr julia poirio from the university of essex julia thanks so much for joining me i'll just go ahead and start with the headline question is asmr real it's not something that everybody experiences but it is something that is genuine so um we've got uh research now showing that there are physiological changes um associated with the asmr response so when people who claim that they have asmr this is a kind of tingling sensation when they watch videos that are intended to reduce that feeling um they show substantial reductions in their heart rate which is consistent with this idea that asmr is something that's relaxing picking up on that point about not everybody being affected have you identified any characteristics that are common to the kinds of people that tend to experience asmr yes it's a good question so um some other groups have looked at um the relationship with personality traits so it seems to be quite strongly related to openness to experience as a personality trait um it's also associated with um other complex emotional experiences like music induced chills so these are the chills that some people get but not everybody um where they listen to certain uh pieces of music and they get the kind of goosebumps the hair standing on end and so those things appear to be associated asmr is also more commonly associated with something called misophonia which literally means hatred of sound so this is kind of um an experience or a condition where people experience extreme kind of anger and irritation have certain sounds like um chewing sounds actually quite a lot of sounds that are asmr as well which is quite interesting for other reasons so there's this idea that potentially people with asmr um have heightened sensory sensitivities from our research what we know is that there seems to be this kind of um this interesting pattern of physiological responding in which you you're getting a reduction in heart rate you're also getting an increase in skin conductance response so you're getting this kind of mixed emotional kind of um response that is also reflected in people's subjective reports so people's people are telling us that they're feeling relaxed but also activated at the same time and this points to the kind of emotional complexity of its mass so as somebody who's interested in emotions um you know we normally think about emotions as being represented in a space that the comprises valence and so positivity or negativity and arousal um so so the idea that it's both arousing and deactivating at the same time is something that's quite interesting from the perspective of emotional complexity a frequent theme that i've noticed in asmr videos and triggers is that of personal care and one of the things i read and i realized this is kind of getting into speculative territory here but whether that was linked to grooming behaviors that are seen in other primates do you think there's anything to that yeah so i mean it's i'm not an evolutionary psychologist so i i don't like to um speculate on kind of those kinds of things it's not really within my events my cheese but there's a couple of things i would say um people often forget that asmr is something that is experienced in real life um and that the videos are intended to be a simulation of circumstances that would trigger asmr naturally um touch is one of the biggest a smart triggers um which obviously just doesn't happen because when you're watching it on screen um so touch is probably the the main asmr trigger um or one of the main ones um but what i find really interesting about the relationship with touch is that um what you're essentially getting is a tactile like response because you're getting some tingling sensation on the scalp and that's like a head massage and but you're getting that from auditory or visual stimuli so this kind of synesthetic type response that's going on and so we we are sort of speculating at the moment and we plan to test this when we can um that there is a link between the benefits that people get from asmr and the benefits that people get from social touch and affected different kinds of touch much has been made of asmr's popularity in our dramatically isolated modern world and obviously the pandemic has made social isolation much worse than before but even before the pandemic there was talk of an epidemic of loneliness and i wondered whether you think that those could be related so that's a good question and something i've wondered you know um in our 2018 study we looked we looked at social connectedness some of that increased after watching our smart videos and it did so there's certainly an element of of asmr is something that could potentially um you know increase feelings of social connection now whether or not that is a good thing i i don't know so i guess there's two two ways to think about this the first is that if you have a substitute for something that you're not getting in your real life you can snack as it were um then that that's good because it might tide you over until you can actually have like a meal on the other hand what it might do is highlight and intensify feelings of disconnection so it might inadvertently even if you're seeking out for social connection be something that you go oh actually i'm not getting this in my real life so the idea that something like asmr might be universally beneficial or something like loneliness i think is something that really needs to be needs i'm picking asmr isn't a cure for loneliness um it might help um but it's not um we really need meaningful social connection um and and this isn't something that happens but you see it all the time i mean there's a whole literature on parasocial relationships you know um and i think this is increasingly common with you know youtube styles and social media in which people feel an attachment to people that they've never even met instead of expanding on the possible uses of asmr my interest in this started when i noticed how often medical consultation seemed to come up in asmr videos so that got me thinking whether there might be any kind of potential for this to be used in a therapeutic way it's interesting so going back to talking about what we're talking about in terms of brain scanning so before i used to get participants into the fmri machine i used to send them a video of somebody being put into an mri machine and so they could hear the sounds and they could you know see what it was like and there's this idea that in some sense that might prepare them and reduce anxiety because they know what to expect it might be that what asmr is doing for some people in certain contexts is it it's reducing anxiety for certain situations like going to the doctors and going to the dentist you know dentist role plays are really common which i find um funny because a lot of people don't like going to the dentist and so in some ways it might be taking certain um social situations that would be difficult taking them out of the the emotional context and making it more kind of more calming and easier to deal with i actually think that what's probably happening is that these are the kind of scenarios that would trigger asmr in real life and so that's why they have kind of infiltrated into online asmr world so there's something about somebody paying close personal attention to you but they're not really interested in you they're interested in a part of you and i think that is what is triggering um about asmr is that it's a level of intimacy and personal interest but it isn't really about you there's a level of anonymity about it so a doctor is interested in you as the patient but they're interested in a very specific part of you like looking at your eye or testing your cranial nerves or whatever it is and they're not it's not really about you so there's this sense of intimacy that can kind of be depersonalized and anonymized and that i think is quite central to asmr i really enjoyed chatting with julia and our conversation went on for quite a bit longer a good 20 minutes or so so if you want to see the full thing head on over to nebula where i've posted a significantly extended cut of this video look when it comes to psychology and neuroscience i'm out of my depth here but the reason julia's studies were very interesting and useful is because they used a control group now a thought i had was why not stick people inside a mri scanner and see what's going on in their brains and another team did look at asmr with fmri scanning but without a control group so i'm not really sure how to interpret the results that would be true irrespective of what they were testing but especially so with mri because some people find them quite unpleasant meanwhile i've undergone mri scans for my knee and my back plus a couple of much longer ones as part of my phd and i actually found them very relaxing and completely fell asleep in two of them and it's hard to discriminate whether tingles would be intrinsic or extrinsic in mri scanner because it's quite normal to have tingling sensation caused by the electromagnetic field hey maybe my asmr requires an enormous two million pound three tesla mri scanner which is somewhat impractical and expensive to say the least well clearly a second channel beckons where i make videos pretending to put people in an mri scanner i'll call it asmri so i'm starting to understand this a bit better i definitely now know that feeling that people talk about if i get a head massage i can be knocked out like a light but i don't seem to get it virtually yet clearly some people do through a screen now i'm pretty skeptical about some of the science that's been collated at asmr university a website set up to try and coordinate research into the field let's just say a lot of it is much more wishy-washy than julia's and is anecdotal or speculative so the jury's out on the actual health benefits as of yet but clearly it seems to help some people and so does the mechanism really matter so with all these medical consultations forming a large part of asmr videos online what can i as a doctor learn from asmr's potential beneficial effect i don't think there's a better person to ask than a veritable legend in asmr circles as well as a practicing doctor dr james gill a man described in youtube comments as the bob ross of medicine hi james thanks so much for for joining me um you're actually my sort of portal into this whole world because i was looking up clinical skills videos and found one of yours and initially i was very excited and delighted that millions of people were interested in learning how to examine the cardiovascular system i mean who can blame them but then i started thinking actually maybe there's something else going on here when did you figure out that actually maybe not all the people watching are medical students or medical professionals and and some people are watching for other reasons actually a couple of years ago we were i was having a christmas dinner believe it or not with my friends and one of them was saying that he was listening and trying to get some videos and stuff to help him sleep and you know his room's dark he's lying there in bed and suddenly my voice came through his computer monitor which obviously stopped him going to sleep and he found out what was going on and you know then told us about it the following day now the thing is i'd done those original videos for the medical school thrown them that way never thought about them again i'd not looked at the numbers it was just a job that was done so we were completely blown away and just randomly loading up youtube and looking at what had happened over the preceding year or so with absolutely no intervention from anybody and and how did you start figuring out what was actually going on did you get comments or any receive any messages it was just looking over the comments and seeing what people had said and the surprising things uh that were there the the thing that came over to myself um was yeah this is obviously the medical students getting the benefit from it but there seemed to be this recurring theme that people were using them to relax which you know i don't about yourself but i'm utterly terrified of going to the dentist and my gp i was actually at medical school with him he's a great guy but you know professionally i like to avoid him so the concept of people wanting to watch medical videos was very interesting shall we say what's your sort of understanding of asmr and in particular how it may play a part in your clinical work we're all aware of the doctor as a drug and particularly in general practice sometimes you'll have a patient that's very worried anxious they need reassurance and you'll go that little bit further in examining them you'll pull out more of the bells and whistles that we don't routinely do but we were educated on i'm sorry let me redo that again but they are also from a an emotional perspective they know that they have been examined completely and i think that there is that crossover with laying hands on people you know why is it that physio done on zoom at the moment with advising someone to do the correct stretches has less of a benefit than the physio doing the same thing face to face helping the person do those movements and putting hands on you know we're a very social species and part of that where the people are doing role plays but they're sort of examining the camera so it feels like the person is being examined i think it's about contact it's about a connection with somebody i did tell one of my friends who's a science youtuber with a pretty big audience and a self-confessed fan of medical asmr he requested he remain anonymous by the way that i was going to talk to james and he was really excited i asked him what he gets from james's videos and he replied that they just send him straight to sleep which might sound like an insult to a regular person but to a youtuber falling asleep while watching a video is wonderful for view time hey hey wake up i'm obviously the wrong audience to appreciate the asmr qualities of a medical video because it just feels like work to me but maybe that in itself is a lesson here are people all over the world dressing up and performing the job that i do in a kind of act now that's something fundamentally different from when i fantasize about taking the first steps on mars or captaining a pirate ship of the undead i'm doing that for my own enjoyment what they're doing is to be enjoyed by others so there's something in what i do that has this significance it's a kind of ritual that has an effects on people nowadays we have such advanced scans easily available we have ample information about a patient's condition without going anywhere near them but even if i'm about to consult their scan results i always listen to their heart and their lungs feel their pulse look at their neck and so on part of that is just to keep my eye in or rather my ear in to stay in touch because i teach these skills the same way james does but when junior doctors ask me why i bother i say it's because it's what the patient expects there's an element of theater to what we do a patient might be told repeatedly that their scan shows their abdominal pain is not worrying but there's something incredibly reassuring about an experienced surgeon laying their hands on the patient and telling them calmly they're okay unfortunately i fear fear that covid has made this many times worse than it was i occasionally get referred patients that are entirely well there's literally nothing wrong with them but i still go through all the motions because i know that the act of me doing that is important to them feeling that they have been assessed properly how this overlaps with the medical asmr phenomenon i don't know i'd really love to hear your views on asmr not just asmr videos but the phenomenon itself i hope you think i've given it a fair assessment now i have given asmr a crack myself i don't mean to brag but i think you'll get some serious tingles so stay tuned to the end of the video to watch but before that i come to you from a beardless future where facial hair has been outlawed curiosity stream and nebula have been consistently and generously supporting me so i can continue making these more esoteric and to me more interesting and fun videos than the non-sponsored ones in between which are obviously mostly about covid and i made a decision right at the start that i wouldn't have any of those sponsored but they're important and i want to keep making them so i really appreciate the support from curiositystream and nebula sponsoring my videos and if you sign up at curiositystream.com medlife and use my code medlife you can get a whole year of curiosity stream and nebula for only 15 which will give you and me some brain tingles nebula is the streaming platform i co-founded with a bunch of educational creators that you already know it's where we can put content that might not work on youtube or we can put extra content like for this video the extended interviews with julia and james or nebula originals things like joe scott's new series on the mysteries of the human body which looks fantastic for extra history's excellent video on tibu sultan curiosity stream is where you find thousands upon thousands of high quality documentaries about science history art space tech and loads more now it's taken me quite a few months to edit this video in little five minute snatches that i get here and there but over that time and reading about asmr i've started getting a bit more into psychology and coupled with the fact that i mentioned neurodiversity in the q a video i made a little while ago and it really seemed to resonate with a lot of people i've got messages and comments that i've really enjoyed reading so i've been exploring curiosity streams section on the mind trying to get more into that and i really loved one documentary called the brain factory about some crazy fools who are on a mission to upload the human brain into a computer like they didn't watch a single episode of black mirror so if you want to support this channel the best way is to sign up for curiosity streamer nebula and get yourself access to all of those titles on both platforms for only 15 which is 26 percent off the normal price and we all know that 26 off is more than 25 off that is science link below [Music] hi my name is dr m crisis i understand you're here for your test results let's get right to that i just want to ensure you're totally relaxed calm everything's going to be okay before we begin i wish to inform you that i've asked two of the hospitals lawyers to join us totally routine so let's get to those results you scored exceedingly highly well done i've never seen a score this high in cancer markers yes a high score is is not what we want here actually you you have a fungating tumor that has riddled your entire body it's a wonder you're even conscious your brain tissue is at this point sludge you have over 600 medical disorders nine separate terminal diseases each of which is catastrophic and four conditions that have just been discovered in you and before you take comfort in the fact that mr burns's diseases were in perfect balance in the skit that i'm riffing on now in your case each disease simply exacerbates the one before please could you sign this consent form it's not for treatment it's so that i can write you up as a case report in the new england journal of medicine how long do you have well i owe you that much to be honest let me check the calendar well today is tuesday so based on the treatment program that i'd like to propose i'd say you've got three two one

Channel: Medlife Crisis

Views: 214,680

Rating: 4.8700614 out of 5

Keywords: Medlife Crisis, Medicine, Science, Education, Comedy, Doctor, Cardiology, Medical School, Biology, Rohin Francis, Surgery, Health, Humour, ASMR, Tingles, Psychology, Neuroscience, Misophonia, James Gill

Id: 33QoTKgYKDI

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021