I’m considering this the closing post for the ASMR series. So I can then move onto the next research project.
Research projects are very important for me. Because they keep my brain working back and forth between abstract thought and real details.
Which not only makes my writing better, it makes my thinking better.
I can tell it makes my thinking better because I’m able to solve problems faster.
I don’t mean academic problems, I mean life problems. Typical life problems.
It makes them easier.
So, while I do aspire to be a writer. And by writer I mean have a margin of success. And by success I mean a respectable amount of strangers are willing to give me their money, the money they actually went to the trouble to earn themselves, to read my writing. While I do want all that.
Even if I never get a dollar amount for my writing the writing is still worth it.
Because it’s teaching me how to use my mind and it’s helping me even out my own extremes.
I’d encourage anyone to write regardless of whether or not they want to be a writer. Writing can give you your mind back.
ASMR caught my eye because I grew up watching those sand cutting videos and had become very fascinated by the current AI fruit cutting videos.
I chose ‘the history of ASMR’ it as my first research project because it was very easy to picture doing the research and how I wanted the article to go.
I could see a starting point, I could see myself working backwards through the information and I could see how I wanted the article to turn out.
That is abstract thought.
And it was wrong.
Nothing I wanted to do with the ASMR article came to be because none of it actually existed.
It was just a bunch of assumptions stacking up in my brain. Assumptions that weren’t even wrong. They just didn’t really exist in context to ASMR.
I had to simply learn things I didn’t know and discover new questions from the learning of the things I didn’t know.
Rather than go back over everything I’ve already recorded in previous posts and I’m going to use this post to add on the studies I read that I didn’t end up using.
They were all interesting studies that were either just too far off on a tangent or things that were required a lot more study for me to understand.
One tangent I fell into was reading about musical chills.
In the study ‘a vigilance explanation of musical chills? Effects of loudness and brightness manipulation’
I read this study because I fell into the tangent of learning that the ‘social tingle’ isn’t the only tingle.
There’s also the music tingle, also known as ‘musical chills’ or ‘musical frisson’.
Frisson.
Of course I’ve heard that word before and I knew what it meant.
But in my whole time of studying ASMR I hadn’t associated the ‘social tingle’ with frisson.
There is also the experience of awe.
This is another tangent I fell into
‘Why Awe Promotes Prosocial Behaviors? The Mediating Effects of Future Time Perspective and Self-Transcendence Meaning of Life’
That was not the original study I read. I did not write it down and can’t find it for the life of me.
But it had the same conclusions. That awe promotes prosocial behavior.
I can experiment with myself on this one, I’m very awe prone. I experience awe pretty much daily unless I’m in a depressed state.
I am also very team oriented. I like to answer to the higher purpose of working towards a common goal with my team.
I am a very good team player and very awe prone so that study tracks in my life. I can see real life evidence for it.
But the point of listing all the studies I read is not to give my perspective on things, I already gave my perspectives.
It’s to show where I got the perspectives so everything is laid out and people can sort of, put together their own pieces to their own puzzles with their own questions.
Jess lanai 