Humans

Take a minute to imagine this sentence being whispered into your ear. If that thought elicits a tingle around the neck, you may have experienced autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR. This strange sensation triggered by, among other things, whispering, card shuffling or chewing noises can induce relaxation in viewers and videos online attract millions of views. But what exactly is going on in our brain? In this week’s Science with Sam we look at the science of ASMR.
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Video transcript
Hello.

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It’s lovely to see you.
Relax.
This is the science of ASMR.
You may have seen videos of people whispering, tapping glasses and even eating very close to microphones. These channels can amass millions of loyal subscribers and you might have wondered, what is going on here?!
This is a world where people come to drift off to sleep, relax and experience the sensation of ASMR.
Autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR is a strange sensation some people get when they watch stimulating videos or take part in other activities which often involve close personal attention.
Sadly, I’m not one of these people, but those who are lucky enough to experience ASMR describe it as a tingle starting around the neck, spreading across the shoulders and back, or a brain massage.
Some people say it’s similar to the feeling of using one of these (head scratcher things).
Different people have different triggers for the sensation. For some it’s watching someone play with a deck of cards, and for some chewing noises or “mouth sounds” put them in a state of intense relaxation. Others find their brain tingles from roleplay or scenes like this…
But the sound of whispering is the most common ASMR trigger, followed by the feeling of someone you love caring personally for you such as stroking your hair or face. But what’s actually going on here? And is there any science behind it?
Despite its undoubted popularity, nobody actually knows what ASMR is yet, although there are many theories. It’s been compared to synaesthesia – a condition where a person experiences a mix up in sensory information – for these people words may take on a certain colour, or music might evoke a particular taste or texture. But this doesn’t quite fit the description of ASMR.
A more promising comparison is something known as ‘frisson’ – sometimes called musical chills. This sensation is triggered by an emotional experience like powerful music and sends a shivery electric like feeling through a person’s body.
People often confuse ASMR and frisson – but ASMR lacks the shivery, electric element. A 2016 review of studies looking at the two sensations argued that perhaps ASMR is relaxing while frisson is arousing.
One study used functional MRI to monitor brain activity in 10 ASMR-sensitive people as they watched videos that trigger the sensation. The scans showed significant activation in parts of the brain linked with reward and emotional arousal. Similar patterns are seen in frisson, suggesting the two sensations are indeed related.
But ASMR videos don’t work for everyone, which raises the question, what’s different about the people who are susceptible?
Psychological studies have found that people who get ASMR have higher scores on openness-to-experience and neuroticism, and lower levels of conscientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness.
It’s possible that there is some underlying genetics that makes people both susceptible to ASMR and neuroticism, but the jury is still currently out. It could be that people who are open to new experiences are more willing to try odd-sounding videos.
Are you an ASMR junkie? Let us know in the comments.
And if you want to learn more about how your brain works, New Scientist is the magazine for you. Use the link in this video to get a special 20 per cent discount.
For those who do experience it, ASMR has real and measurable effects.
One study monitored people’s heart rate and skin conductance – a measure of emotional arousal – while they watched ASMR videos. Everyone’s heart rates slowed, but in people who experience ASMR, it slowed more. Unexpectedly they found that skin conductance increased indicating increased emotional arousal.
Some have suggested that ASMR may be to do with social connections and emotional bonding. A study found that the brain activation sparked by ASMR is similar to what we see in people and animals experiencing friendly behaviour. It’s been compared to the great apes grooming each other. They receive close personal attention from another ape – and this pastime seems to be greatly rewarding to them.
Studies have also found that people report greater feelings of social connection after ASMR. Maybe it is an intense version of the feeling we all get when loved ones tend to us – and these videos can be a shortcut to it.
But this satisfying sensation may not last. People have increasingly reported that their experience of ASMR is diminishing when they watch too many videos. The phenomenon has been dubbed “ASMR immunity” and it’s a bit like when drug users require larger doses to get the same high.
But taking a break can bring back the pleasant sensations just as substance users take a break to bring back a drug’s effects.
Whatever the explanation, watching ASMR videos can give those who experience it an amazing elevation in mood that persists for hours after. And whilst it’s no replacement for that feel-good factor we get from being with our close friends and family, it can be a handy shortcut for some.
And who couldn’t do with a bit more pleasure in our lives, right now?

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By Michael Marshall

Geoglyphs found in the desert near Boha, IndiaYohann Oetheimer
A huge spiral carved into the ground in India covers almost 100,000 square metres, dwarfing other individual geoglyphs like those in the Nazca desert in Peru.
The spiral is in a small cluster of geoglyphs discovered by father-and-son researchers Carlo and Yohann Oetheimer, who are based in Luriecq, France. Carlo searched Google Earth images of the Thar desert in India and identified eight sites with possible geoglyphs. In 2016, they flew a drone over them and found that four were furrows dug for failed tree plantations.
One site …
Article amended on
26 May 2021

We corrected the number of sites that were failed tree plantations More

By Krista Charles

Catfish was being eaten in Jerusalem and surrounding areas even as Judaism was emerging thereIndradkristiono/Getty Images
Non-kosher fish was on the menu in areas that are now part of Israel and Egypt while Judaism was developing in the region and the Hebrew Bible was being written there.
The Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible – states that certain foods, including pork and aquatic animals that lack fins and scales, shouldn’t be eaten. Modern, practising Jewish people are prohibited from eating these foods.

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To explore the origin of the custom, Yonatan Adler at Ariel University in the West Bank and Omri Lernau at the University of Haifa in Israel examined ancient fish bones from 30 archaeological sites in Israel and Sinai dated from about 1550 BC to AD 640. They found that finless and scaleless fish were regularly eaten during that 2000-year period.
“What people were doing in the past often leaves a footprint on the material record, just as we leave footprints today,” says Adler. “We are, as archaeologists, rifling through ancient people’s garbage, essentially, and learning about their actual behaviour. So, by looking at archaeological finds, we learn what ancient Jews were doing.”
The research forms part of a larger project to determine the origins of Judaism, in this case looking at food laws.

Lernau identified different fish species from about 20,000 bones and found that of the non-kosher fish, catfish was eaten the most. Other non-kosher fish that were eaten include rays and sharks.
“If you have fish, especially in a place which is far from a water source, let’s say Jerusalem [where one of the 30 sites was located]. People were bringing these fish to Jerusalem, and if you brought a fish to Jerusalem, it was to eat it. You can’t really do anything with fish aside from eating it,” says Adler.
Many scholars believe that the Jewish dietary laws came about because there wasn’t a precedent for eating these foods in the culture at the time, but the presence of non-kosher fish in these ancient diets suggests otherwise.
“We can see that things developed very slowly, and the interpretation of these laws were not as fixed as people might think,” says James Aitken at the University of Cambridge. “Jewish identity was a slow process and not immediately apparent. Jews did not look different from their neighbours. They did not behave differently or eat differently.”
Journal reference: Tel Aviv, DOI: 10.1080/03344355.2021.1904675
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By Michael Marshall

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Stone Age hunters living in what is now South Africa built long rock walls that acted as traps, funnelling fleeing prey animals into kill zones where they could be easily dispatched.
While these “desert kites” are common in the Middle East, it was thought that southern African hunter-gatherers didn’t build them and instead left little or no mark on the landscape.
“I predict that there may be many more kite sites in southern Africa,” says Marlize Lombard at the University of Johannesburg in South … More

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A virtual model of a mouse neocortex seen in In SilicoCourtesy of Sandbox Films
In Silico
Noah Hutton

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SHORTLY after gaining a neuroscience degree, young film-maker Noah Hutton fell into the orbit of Henry Markram, a neuroscientist based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
Markram models brains in all their complexity. His working assumption is that since the brain is an organ, a sufficiently good computer model ought to reveal its workings, just as “in-silico” models of kidneys, livers and hearts enrich our under standing.
The world is filled with people who seem to think in different ways. Much as we might want to understand this full diversity, no one is going to dig about in a living human. Markram hopes that a computer model will offer an ethically acceptable route.
So far, so reasonable. Except that, in 2009, Markram said he would build a working computer model of the brain in 10 years. This was during a TED talk about his Blue Brain Project (BBP), set up in 2005 to model the mouse brain.
Every year for well over a decade, Hutton interviewed Markram, his colleagues and his critics as the project expanded and the deadline shifted. Hutton’s film, In Silico, is the result.
Markram’s vision transfixed purseholders across the European Union: in 2013, he won €1 billion of public cash to set up the Human Brain Project (HBP).
“It is within our power to model some organs. But the brain isn’t an organ in the usual sense”
Although his tenure at its Geneva headquarters didn’t last long, Markram is hardly the first founder to be wrested from the controls of their institute. His BBP endures: its in-silico model of the mouse neocortex is visually astounding.
Perhaps that is the problem. In a voice-over, Hutton says the HBP has become a special-effects house, a shrine to touchscreens and VR headsets, but lacks meaning “outside this glass and steel building in Geneva”.
We have heard such criticisms before. What about how the CERN particle physics lab sucks funds from the rest of physics? There is no shortage of disgruntled junior researchers blaming it for failed grant applications. CERN, however, gets results; HBP, not so much.
The problem runs deep. It is within our power to model some organs, but the brain isn’t an organ in the usual sense. By any engineering measure, it looks inefficient. A spike in the neurons can trigger the release of this neurotransmitter, except when it releases another one – or does nothing. There is bound to be some commonality in brain anatomy, but so far research shows that every brain is like a beautiful, unique snowflake.
The HBP’s models generate noise, just like real brains. In the film, there is a vague mention of “emergent properties”. Yet linking that noise to brain activity is an intellectual Get Out of Jail Free card if ever there was one: no one knows what this noise means, so there is no way to tell if the model is making the right noise.
Deep learning guru Terrence Sejnowski, who is based at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, tells Hutton that the whole caper is a bad joke – if successful, Markram will only generate a simulation “every bit as mysterious as the brain itself”.
Hutton accompanies us into the yawning gap between Markram’s reasonable ambitions and the promises he makes to attract funds. It is a film made on a budget of nothing, and it isn’t pretty. But Hutton makes up for all that with the sharpest of scripts.

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New research suggests the connection between exercise and the brain goes deeper than you might think. These six kinds of movement can help make you more creative, boost your self-esteem and reach altered states of consciousness

Health

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Sergio Membrillas
FILTER-FEEDERS aside, humans are the only creatures that can get away with sitting around all day. As a species, we have been remarkably successful at devising ways to feed, entertain ourselves and even find mates, all while barely lifting a finger.
True, this is a sign of just how clever and adaptable we are. But there is a huge cost to our sedentary ways, not only to our bodies, but also our minds. Falling IQs and the rise in mental health conditions have both been linked to our lack of physical movement.
But the connection between movement and the brain goes deeper than you might think. A revolutionary new understanding of the mind-body connection is revealing how our thoughts and emotions don’t just happen inside our heads, and that the way we move has a profound influence on how our minds operate. This opens up the possibility of using our bodies as tools to change the way we think and feel.
Evidence is starting to stack up that this is indeed the case, and it isn’t all about doing more exercise. In my new book, Move! The new science of body over mind, I explore emerging research in evolutionary biology, physiology, neuroscience and cell biology to find out which body movements affect the mind and why.
Whatever it is that you want from your mind – more creativity, improved resilience or higher self-esteem – the evidence shows that there is a way of moving the body that can help. Here is my pick of the best ways to use your body to achieve a healthier, better-functioning mind.
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