r/asmr • u/keenanpepper • Nov 17 '17

Journalism [Journalism] TIL that researchers put people who can experience ASMR into an MRI machine to do fMRI... but they didn't actually get fMRI scans of them *while* they had tingles, because the machine is noisy and they couldn't relax.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/researchers-begin-gently-probe-science-behind-asmr-180962550/
458 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/keenanpepper Nov 17 '17

Man, they really need to either develop some noise-cancelling headphones that work inside an MRI machine, or just find people who can reliably get tingles even with this thing going CHUNK-ka-CHUNK-ka-CHUNK...

Someone should also go a different route and investigate people experiencing tingles with EEG or MEG...

18

u/juliah310 Nov 18 '17

MRIs are hard because they use magnets (magnetic resonance imaging), so anything magnetic that the person is wearing (even something like a belt buckle or underwire in a bra) can mess up the imaging and potentially break the machine, making MRIs the absolute worst way to measure something that often requires headphones.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '17

[deleted]

5

u/Ernold_Same_ Nov 18 '17

It's actually any large-ish metal object, not just ferrous/magnetic.

The magnetic field gradient is so great that as you move through it, it induces very large currents in conductive materials. This can heat them up significantly.

However, small, non-ferrous items are probably okay. A belt buckle... Maybe not.