Jess lanai

The subject I hated most in school was history.

Because the main goal of history seemed to be to memorize and regurgitate facts.

Facts are fucking boring.

Details are boring. Unless the details mean something by fulfilling an actual purpose.

It’s much easier for me to remember a detail if I didn’t know the detail before knowing why the detail matters.

The detail becomes its own mechanism that helps me understand the function of what I am trying to learn.

And I can only find the purpose before the detail if I have a question.

And the question can’t be about what is right or wrong. What is generally correct or generally incorrect.

The question has to come from myself. It has to come from my genuine lack of understanding or genuine curiosity.

It can be tough to admit when we don’t understand things. We might understand the intellectual concept of a thing but we can relate to it.

Like oh, there’s space and stars in the sky. Yeah. I know that.

But I don’t know what the fuck that actually means. I just know the knowledge.

The reason I chose ASMR to research was because number one, I wanted to know how the hell it became a thing.

It was a thought I actually had. How in all of hell did we wind up with AI videos that mimic cutting fruit? And why is it so mesmerizing?

What the hell does ASMR stand for?

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response

What on earth does that mean?

Autonomous means involuntary. Which is weird I thought autonomous meant like, independent.

Sensory means like, feeling. Or sensation. Okay I can handle that.

But Meridian? This goddamn word gave me so much trouble. I thought a meridian was like the center of a city. Like, the general middle. Closest spot between all points.

It does mean that. But here that’s not what it means. Here it means climax. Yes. As in.

Highest point of pleasure.

Then we have the last word. Response. Okay. I can handle that word too.

So ASMR means involuntary sensation climax response.

Who the hell named this and why did they pick such an asshole way to word things?

Oh, Jennifer Allen named ASMR. And she gave it such an asshole name because she wanted it to sound sciencey, so sciencey people would be interested in it. Which worked.

Who is Jennifer Allen? Don’t really care because all she did was coin the term in a medical forum thread where people were discussing the pleasurable ‘tingle’ they get from listening to ‘soft sounds’ like people whispering.

Whispering videos to on YouTube were a thing. People got ‘head tingles’ from people whispering into microphones.

What are head tingles? I didn’t know. People described them as a pleasurable tingling sensation that starts at the top of the head and radiates down the spine.

I had to invest time trying to achieve a ‘head tingle’ by watching the type of videos that are most likely to cause them.

It did not work. I did not experience the ‘head tingles’ people described.

Not until I stopped watching the videos and only listened to them. Then it worked.

I felt the head tingle and I realized I had felt it before. Never from watching a video. Just from life.

What worked best for me personally to experience the ‘head tingle’ was videos like feathers and things being dragged over a microphone. But if I watched it happen I didn’t get the tingles.

The sound had to take me a bit by surprise. And I have a theory for why that is but I’ll talk about that later.

Here’s the main thing about the brain tingles. The ASMR. The sensation being described.

The ASMR (Asshole way of saying brain tingles) became very unimportant to ASMR.

Actual science studies on ASMR started on the ASMR itself. The brain tingle response itself.

But the brain tingle response lost all focus in ASMR studies pretty quickly.

And the popularity of ASMR no longer has anything to do with the head tingle itself.

The videos to inspire the head tingle itself now exist in the niche.

There is a lot of sciencey stuff and science paper stuff and study stuff with different reasons and thoughts and questions people had about ASMR.

All of it is stuff I have no training in. I’m not a sciencey person. I had to learn how to read sciencey papers.

But I was able to get a grasp on the history of ASMR and on science of it and even form my own theories on it.

I’ll even share my really dumb theories and where those dumb theories actually lead me.

Because it’s very important to realize that every study done came from an individual theory and then question and then investigation and then the search for a detail that could confirm a purpose.

This is how even dumb people can come to understand complex things. And really and actually understand them. Not just memorize the answers they think people want to know or will be impressed by.