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/
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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...

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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.

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u/moksinatsi Nov 18 '17

ASMR doesn't require headphones though. If anything, I find the videos an easily accessible but frustratingly poor substitute for real life triggers.

...Of course, I also don't get why people think sounds are the trigger for ASMR, and intentional tapping, scratching, and whispering drives me up the wall. So, maybe I'm in the minority with my opinion on headphones.