A popular science. We report and right dozens of Science and Tech stories every week. And while most of the things we find and up in our articles. We also come across plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured why not share those with you welcome to the weirdest thing. I learned this week a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel feltman. I met Michel and bomb and I'm Eleanor Commons and Eleanor is very upset already. Yes. So listeners, I'm going to I'm slowly transitioning out of the whisper because I feel like I'm just going to scream accidentally usually on the weirdest thing. I learned this week. We offer up little teases and share little facts and spin them into crazy stories little science Yarns if you will and we vote on which one was the weirdest thing we live in this week, but this week we're diving Into a feature package that Eleanor wrote for our latest print issue. Yes. We make a print magazine four times a year. It's pretty excellent and the topic as you may have guessed is so good ASMR is this internet phenomenon where people seek out videos that have like sounds of hair brushing and whispering and chewing and things like cosplay all because it gives them an unusual and by all accounts soothing Physical sensation and listeners, don't worry, if you don't like ASMR, which we will get into discussing very shortly. You're not alone. This episode is not actually going to be full of intentional ASMR triggers. We're going to go through and take apart some of the really fascinating things we learned while Eleanor reported in wrote this package on ASMR and our colleague Amy Sheldon bomb who is an eye long time ASMR enthusiasts. It's true is going Jump in with questions as she has them and so we're just going to really like take you into this Sonic exploration of this beautiful print piece that we're all really proud of and hopefully you can pick up a copy on newsstands and check it out for yourself. It's beautiful to see and experience but we thought it would be a shame to not talk about some noises with our mouth sounds we will do some ASMR somewhere in the middle of the episode, but we will give you fair warning. So you can skip ahead if you don't want to hear us chew on stuff. So Eleanor. Hello. Why don't you kick us off by telling us like what made you pitch this to me? Because I know that we talked about it for some time before it actually came to be. Yeah, so I have self diagnosed with this thing called misophonia, which is a severe aversion to specific sound triggers like mouth sounds that people make when they're Whispering into a microphone or eating Foods. And it's very painful and bad but I talk about it all the time with people because I'm trying to be like more like yeah, this is just me like sorry that I'm physically recoiling and I was talking to one of my friends about it. And I knew that I had already wanted to write a story about it because we had this noise issue coming up but she kept saying I like, you know, like what is this misophonia thing? Like everyone keeps talking about it? Like I don't understand and I reflexively it was just like well it's because we're persecuted by the ASMR people and the more I thought about About it the more I was like wait, is that kind of what's going on here? And so I started looking into it and it turns out that misophonia and ASMR which stands for auto sensory Meridian response and is sort of the complete opposite of misophonia and that you love certain sound triggers, like people whispering. They give you the Shivers. Yeah, they give you this amazing as it's called brain orgasm. No, yeah. Yeah. I really hate that Amy speaks for many members of the a smrti who would really like them to stop. Referred to as brain orgasms. Yeah, not a popular term. But anyway, it turns out that these things that seem very distinct and almost like Polar Opposites may be related and that by kind of studying them together. We could better understand what makes people love sound and potentially like all chill out the way that ASMR people get to when they're hearing their favorite videos that's dope. I was talking to a researcher named Nick Davis who was sort of the advisor to Emma Barrett who published the the first peer-reviewed article on ASMR in 2015. And so they were at Swansea University and he was like, yeah, I was so uncomfortable when Emma brought this to me the quote. I literally pulled this out of our interview. She started bringing up all these videos of beautiful Russian women whispering and I thought this is really weird and I don't want this on my University Computer, right? And that's a great intro to talk about like, you know, one of the reasons this this package is so fantastic is that the research is really in it. Infancy for both of these phenomena and part of that prop. I mean, so it's something that didn't get a lot of attention for a long time and really liked came to public attention during the age of the internet, but then there was a lag with the research because it had first come into the public Consciousness on the internet. So it was like, oh this weird Bad on YouTube. You're certainly not doing your dissertation on that and it took pioneers. Like Emma Barrett to say yes, I am totally. Yeah, I mean, they're probably like a million other people like Nick Davis who just didn't get over it and start looking into it and one of the the researchers I talked to Agnieszka Janek make early and she was talking about how she really struggled to get her study published for two years because everyone was just like this really weird sex fetish like is not science and she was like, no this is one. It's not sexual also sex can be studied scientifically. Yeah, I would like first of all the weird sex fetishes are science. Yes, and then also three like this is an objective phenomenon that we see like similar patterns in people across cultures. Like when we look at this it is real and demonstrable and still, you know, Publications were just like this is like some weird YouTube thing and like we can't this isn't science and we can't validate it and I'm like, we don't care. Well, even the reason the name is like really pseudoscience e and kind of a subject of debate is that it was named by like an Enthusiast not a researcher. Yeah in 2010. This woman named Jennifer Young Who as far as I can tell is a cyber security professional in Canada, you know, not a neurologist or psychiatrist or anything. She started a Facebook group for other people who were experiencing this sensation. And so she just named it ASMR autonomous sensory Meridian Response Group, and that's literally where the name comes from like it is not from the scientific literature at all. It was just people trying to stop people from calling it brain orgasm. Yeah what I love what I loved was finding out that because during the course of edits Someone at some point was like we need to explain why the word Meridian is in here and it was because she was looking for something vague to replace the concept of an orgasm and she chose Meridian in terms of like being at a great height like a climax. Oh Lord. Yeah and that has kind of hoping it was like energy meridians or some now. I assume that as well, but it apparently referred to kind of like a vague take on the definition of the word. Ian using it to mean something that doesn't actually mean which again is fine like somebody needed to name it ASMR is a great acronym but it's true that the ASMR just has like it's kind of a meaningless string of words definitely and to your point Lake it is so under-researched misophonia as well. Like we don't even know how many people experience ASMR at this point. Also we don't understand how much of it is kind of like a spectrum like it it is very unlikely that there are people who experience no, positive sort of Sensations from sounds or exclusively negative, you know experiences from sounds and so we're still trying to like map this but what we do know is that people probably do all experience ASMR to some degree in the classic example of this is like if you've ever gotten a haircut and thought like dang that felt great like that is start of that's like the very, you know, basic minimal in-person introduction to what people can experience with these Adios, so Amy since you experience it, I do not experience the opposite. I hate it. What is it? Like I've heard it described as like a tingling on your scalp, I guess maybe but it's mostly it's mostly just very comforting. It's like your mom brushing your hair or I don't know. It's like it's like really to me. It feels like like warmth and just really soothing not necessarily. Tingly. I think like at some point. That was I mean, I don't know. I feel like I An experience that and a while but like I don't know but it's mostly just this universally sort of like Pleasant. It's on some soft feeling and it didn't know to your point about it being like a spectrum. Like there are certain sounds that I really do not like including sounds that are like ASMR sounds that are often considered an ASMR sounds like I don't really like mouth sounds either. I really do not like sounds of people eating good thing. I brought this pickle to eat. Ya think Rachel but like there's a lot of like like a I guess serum dropper bottle the way that it like clinks against the the neck of the bottle like that just sounds so wow nice to me and it's not it's really not about necessarily sounds people make with their own bodies. I don't find that to be particularly soothing. Yeah. It's all it's all stuff that I feel like to me at least like is connected to like somebody taking care of me and I wonder if like that has something to do with the fact that like if ASMR is more. Really experienced and women who don't have sort of like caretakers in the way that maybe men might grow up and have caretakers in their wives or spouses interesting but it's kind is kind of I don't know if that's the same thing as like the tingle response or if that is just enjoying sounds. Yeah. So I was talking to GB ASMR, right who is like the like undefeated Champion. Oh, right. Yes, Mr. Videos awesome artist. Yes the ultimate and so she was As saying that she has like a range of reactions to different towns and there are some things that will just give her that leg pure a tingling sensation that she thinks is what other people are talking about. But that like the videos that she likes the most in returns to often are the ones that just give her that warm feeling you're talking about. Right and that like yeah even just for an individual person like there is such a spectrum there in terms of what you respond to and it changes on its kind of contextual like she was saying, you know, she's like she was basically like I consume ASMR content all day long and then I So make it and you know, like during the day like you'll want something different than at night when you're trying to go to sleep, right then, you know pick a completely different set of sounds and so it's very yeah, it's very interesting. How varied it can be. Yeah well in like one thing that didn't fit in anywhere in the package, but that I've been thinking about ever since I read about it like three years ago is that there are ASMR videos of all genres. I mean, there's obviously porn like make sense, but there's also ASMR porn Yeah anything yeah, and there's also relatedly and I've seen I've seen this on the subway. There's relatedly like point of view personal attention videos. Yeah. So like I've once I looked down on the subway and I was watching a video that was just like from the perspective of someone who was being led around by a beautiful woman on a beach. Yeah, and she kept like leaning close and I'm not even like people talking to a mic with ears on it like yeah, like actually like me around. Yeah and personal attention to you is do you come up in the package as Like something that maybe the same phenomenon as ASMR, but we know so little about ASMR that it's impossible to say right now but ASMR enthusiasts and content creators do definitely in some cases lump these together. We're like ASMR videos aren't always about sound anymore. Sometimes it's like someone's making intense eye contact with you and talking to you really gently and it's just about that like intense personal focus and that people say that gives them like the same kind of warm fuzzies. And yeah, I have at least this one guy on the subway next to me one time is an avid consumer of point of view personal attention videos and it was like it was not explicit. It definitely felt poor me though. It was a very sensuous little film it is saying I mean, but there's also like is a sensuous little film. I mean we've had first person shooters for a long time. Yeah. Oh totally. It's like I didn't have a problem with him. Watch that Subway. I were no there were no, Like boobs out or whatever it was fine, but I was like watching men consume passenger fun. So why they're always like looking at my poor knee weird Instagram accounts or like catalog something like this is sorry. This is address catalog exams and Instagram influencers, but the thing that I read an article about a while back was ASMR horror videos. Yes. There's a huge. Yeah. There was one that I watched out of curiosity. Yeah. You mean doesn't like it. It that there's one I watch like to feed my curiosity that was like it was like the heartache on like a you're getting your hair cut video. Yeah where you wake up and I'm mad scientist is like performing an autopsy while you're still alive. Yeah and like speaking gently to you with vocal fry as he like buzz isn't a clear sky. He was like, I like I can think of one friend who probably would be really into it but it is the sex thing and like it just as Aang how many different moods people like seek to have triggered by ASMR one of the things I was talking about with Craig Richard who is the founder of ASMR University which is sort of this like Clearing House for like all things ASMR like this guy is on it like you go to the site and it's like every single thing that's ever been published or not yet published and he was like, you know, what do all of these ASMR videos haven't in common besides some sort of allegedly triggering sound. And it's hands it was just like, you know, like there are all of these unexplored visual connotations of ASMR as well that we like. We don't even have the sound part characterized like we're so far away from getting to this but like this will be the next stage of research is like, what does it mean, you know to have these like the classic internet hands right that like kind of come in and out of the frame. Yeah, as part of the sense of like personal attention, like people will put their hands up toward, you know, the camera like as they're whispering and like does Bring you more in like, you know, how are all of these sort of different senses Eleanor speaking rate hand gestures, right? Thank you. I wish everyone could add - it's very calming. But yeah, so that was that was one thing that he was just like, you know, like stage 2 of ASMR research and like 10 more years will need to look at this kind of interplay. This episode of the weirdest thing I learned this week is brought to you by anchor if you haven't heard about anchor it's the easiest way to make a podcast. It's free their creation tools that allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or computer anchor distributes your podcast for you. So it can be heard on Spotify Apple podcasts and more and you can make money on your podcast with no minimum listenership. It's everything you need to make a podcast in one place download the free anchor app or go to Anchored. FM to get started one of the things that didn't make it into the story that is a public service announcement. Is that when you Google misophonia, the first thing you pull up is a 23andMe report that says that they've found like the genetic origin of misophonia. I just wanted to say they have it. Um, the genetic testing company is claiming that they've identified a single variant called RS two nine three, seven five seven three that increases a person's risk of quote being filled with rage when others too, but I talked to Psychiatrist at the academic Medical Center in Amsterdam named Amy and Dennis who literally called this a hoax which is a great choice of words. I thought that was very funny. I tried not to laugh on the phone, but he was like, it's based on a genome-wide Association study, which is a very common way of looking for Trends in DNA of people who report certain characteristics, but it's not typically seen as like reliable on its own. It's like the first step in a research process, right? So basically it was like there's way too much to testicle noise, you know to ever say that we've found the thing and Then he was also like most conditions just generally in life are too complex to tied to a single snippet of your genome. And so I just think that you know, every researcher I talked to about this was kind of like the seams misleading and while it may not, you know be especially harmful to believe this I think it's just good to remember that as these things come out about ASMR probably to in the future. Our DNA is not just going to reveal ourselves to us like yeah, things are always a little more mysterious than that. So why don't you talk a little bit about the kind of like the Cracks of the main essay in this package is like maybe ASMR and misophonia are two sides of the same coin. And so like what are some of the the mechanisms that are being investigated for causing those like seemingly diametrically opposed triggers. Yeah. So I talked with as I said, Nick Davis and then he worked with Emma Barrett and then doctormick earlene. They were all sort of researching ASMR at the same time 2014-2015. They started looking at this question scientifically. And you know, the early work was identifying key triggers. And so what came up and both of them is like Whispering this sort of broad concept of personal attention crisp sounds those were all things that people seemed to really enjoy and then they were finding this strange thing where a lot of the people in their sample who self-reported ASMR and then were observed experiencing ASMR also reported hating a lot of sounds too. And so they kind of set this aside and then doctormick early. Him back to it and she was like, you know, I really want to know what's going on here because the numbers were just kind of crazy. So when Marilyn and I were on the phone she was telling you how she discovered that 36 percent of people with self-reported ASMR had severe misophonia compared to 22% of people without a Samar in her study and severe misophonia is like the kind that like you typically need some sort of help to cope with there's no cure for misophonia. Like you can't cure sounds but you can talk to people about, you know, using like stress balls instead of like screaming. Aiming at people eating which is something we've all considered. So on a hunch having seen this in her population, you know, it's sort of like a normal correlation. It doesn't stand out too much. But what you decide to do with separately test a group of college students and she found that among those participants who experienced ASMR but didn't seek out triggering videos 70 point eight percent had clinically significant misophonia. So almost twice as many as in the other population and what that suggested to her was that for these people the discomfort. That they experienced because of their misophonia outweighed any of the benefits of the tingles that they were capable of feeling and so they kind of have the capacity for both this calming sensation and the sort of like misophonia crazed the misophonia was just so intense that they were never going to try to listen to ASMR videos. Yeah. And so then what scientists are trying to do now is see what kind of connections there are between the two so we know for example that both are affecting the nervous system as far as we can tell Wow, and they also appear to be altering brain function in some way. So we're you know trying to probe this deeper and understand how they might be related in terms of like the nervous system. Like what we find is that for people with misophonia when they are experiencing their triggers like someone eating around them their heart rate will rise as well as they're like skin conductivity. So that's like sort of the sweat on your fingertips, which is an indication of arousal not necessarily in a sexual way but like Jesus, you know, your body is like Is reacting to the world and then on the flip side for ASMR your heart rate lowers, but your skin conductivity also increases and so there's this thinking that maybe what that indicates is that ASMR is actually like kind of working you up. But in this way that feels soothing so you can be experiencing the same sort of biological phenomenon, but the way your brain is interpreting that is like wildly different then we've also looked through fmri studies of kind of and brain Imaging studies of what's kind of going on in the brain. Rain, and we're finding that potentially for misophonia and maybe we might one day discover ASMR as well. There's this role of interceptive awareness going on. So that's sort of like called your Sixth Sense and it's your sense of your own body's internal State and with misophonia. They think that maybe people who have it have very hyper aware interoceptive capacity, but they're kind of misinterpreting the data. So like even before you consciously register, Sound it may be activating your body and creating this kind of fight or flight response that people talk about and so now the question is like is the same thing potentially happening with ASMR where you're so in tune with your body in a way that maybe other people are not that you're kind of hyper aware of these things that maybe everybody is experiencing but you just like grown in on them and that related to make Orleans Original study where she was trying to identify ASMR triggers. She was also looking at the personality traits of people with ASMR and she found that on the big Five Index, right which is this thing that's like neuroticism openness to experience etcetera. Like I believe people would ASMR had really high openness to experience which to sort of shows like this interesting interplay in their biological capacity for experiencing sounds and they're like attitude and personality and the way that they approach the world. So the question now is like if we can sit strange. Yeah, and if you if you if you like except that about yourself, it's a lot harder. Yeah. Be yeah. Yeah, and that's I think why people are very frustrated by the question of like is it is it sex? It's because it's like well it is kind of weird but like I'm like okay with it and it's great and I enjoy it right and like it doesn't have to be like problematize door like, you know made into a taboo. This is something that yeah that the community has been overcoming and I mean like in a big way one of the stats we have in there. Is that as of 2018. I think there were 13 million ASMR Leo's on YouTube like they're doing okay now. This episode of the weirdest thing I learned this week is brought to you by Spotify on Spotify. You can follow your favorite podcasts. So you never miss an episode Plus premium users can download episodes to listen to offline wherever they are and it's super easy to share what you're listening to with friends on Instagram on Spotify. You can listen to all of your favorite podcasts and music artists in one place for free. You do not need a premium account if you haven't done so already be sure to download The Spotify app search for the weirdest thing. I learned this week on Spotify or browse podcasts in the your library tab. Also, make sure to follow the weirdest thing. I learned this week. So you never miss an episode. So maybe we'll take a we interlude now to share some some ASMR noises with our listener Elders gonna die. She's not ready. I'm not um, so let's see we have some supplies here we talk. About the like sub-genre of mukbang which is like a Korean video where people eat it just like tons of food into a microphone. It's not a sub-genre. It's actually completely different thing. It's meant to be it's not meant to be about the sounds at all. It's about sometimes they like combine them but it's a developed. I believe completely separately and it's more like you're having lunch with your friends and people are lonely. It's very contest on it of whether mukbang is ASMR and like how they relate because a lot of people Now our marketing their mukbang as ASMR, correct and saying that that is what they because if you similar on the whole our city and it leaps into the whole personal attention video right to right regardless, I was going to get some Korean food. I was going to get some chewy rice cakes to eat into this microphone and I was told that it was too early for lunch, which was extremely rude, but I do have some gummy candy, which is another one that got talked about as an ASMR trigger in the course of us researching and and creating this package and that one was surprising to me. Me I don't think of myself as being sensitive to sound but I was like surely no one likes the chewy mouths. Yeah, I did get also get a very crisp pickle because I can understand the crunchy mouth sounds a just the packaging. Oh, yeah, we have some packages and we have of course a magazine with with Pages. They also have a hairbrush and then there are all the different ways. You can make with your fingers Eleanor you were doing some lovely fluttering or yeah, I learned in the night. Oh my God. She just like flutters our fingers into the microphone. My Knuckles are too big. I can't I can't like get your fingers like tips of my fingers. It's messed up. Why are my hands another one that comes up as both a bad trigger and is a good trigger is knuckle cracking which like I guess I can hear how that might be good or bad. I don't really like it, but it's not the worst. We have a hairbrush. Yeah. Oh, I'll do this one. I love the sound of my hair being brushed. Let me find my hair. Also. It's like it's so scary sound. It's so great. Seeing the different mic setups people like will have Mike's covered in like dust covers and they brush the like fluffy. Yeah ever like it's hair. I love it. Okay, here's my hair being brushed. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, I think that's nice. Yeah, it is really nice. Wow, that felt great. You want a nice to meet you and then you know, there's various like tapping tapping is a controversial one. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh that seems one of the most one of the more benign ones to me. I guess I can depend on like I could see if you if you like topic something with like big acrylic nails. I think it's more it's more about the like this style of the tap. I think that's nice. Thanks. Yeah. It's like a pig is like a rain stick. And then, you know you have various like packaging you have like crinkly food. There's a lot of sounds in here because these are Sour Patch Kids. So yeah, these are sour patch kids. So there's like powder inside. Oh, wow. This is a whole new. Rachel you're innovating. What's inside? This makes me want to die. Yeah, I took my headphones off for this one. All right. Yeah that that would that the food chewing stuff like that does put me into a rage. Although I think like this sound is probably gonna be good. Sure. I want to get a lot of buildup. He's like hell, yeah, I like it. It's satisfying. It's not like a mushy sound right just not something I even when I was the one the sound of the pickle. It's not the sound of your mouth. Yeah, it is key when I was chewing this hour of had two kids. I didn't like it. It may have made me like Sour Patch Kids last year that in my headphones as I ate them this eater writer recently did a piece about like why is everything in television so loud when people are eating and they were like I have misophonia, why are all of the Royce on succession? Chomping on chicken at like a billion decibels and I was like, I've never really dated to reporting more than this that I'm gonna stop in this pickle. So now we will cease with the ASMR examples we yeah, but in the in the book the magazine, honestly the Sour Patch Kids powder was my favorite sound of all this almost sounds so I'm new surprising it. Yes. This also has its associated with things, you know, certainly we for really like one of the things I thought was interesting about misophonia is that like it is very much like it's personally felt in that like you won't typically react to like a baby crying but like if an adult made that sound you'd be like what is wrong with you. Right? And so it's kind of moralistic in that way and which is something I've been working on accepting since the therapist who works with misophonia. Nia patients was like yeah, like it's kind of judgmental like it really is yours triggers are not as universal as you think and I wonder if the same is true for a smart right? Like contextually the same thing is not always going to make you feel great. Just so there's a lot of it like has to be really intentional. You can't like it's like tickling right? Like it becomes very unpleasant when you do not want to be yeah, you know, like when you're an adult you like don't don't tickle me totally and it also has to be done so gently to make Get to really highlight the sounds and minimize like the interference like GB was telling me that she is like a really loud person and I could tell that's on the phone like she's a wonderful person to talk to but she was like, yeah when I told my family I was going to do this they were all like what's wrong with you? You can never make this work like you're like a crazy person you're so loud and annoying and she was like, it's been like a really intentional effort to slow myself down and to behave in this kind of controlled way that these videos Videos actually come across as peaceful. Yeah, so I thought that was interesting that even a SM artists are like fighting the good fight to be calm. Yeah, that's key. It's peaceful. It's really yeah well and the kind of the the conclusion of the the main article on the package is like could we harness whatever is working about ASMR for people who love it and enjoy it not just to help people with misophonia, but to actually make everybody. Kamar yeah, I tell people cope with life. Yeah, really? Yeah, it's I need help. It's crazy that people would ASMR are disabled to sort of like turn on a YouTube video like that's amazing and it would be great if that was available to everybody and you know, one of the therapists that I spoke to who are says misophonia patients was like I know at least one of my patients is using ASMR to cope with their misophonia. Like they find the sounds that make them happy and it would just be so cool. If like we all could like chill out and just like listen to her like happy. Curacao, you know, that'd be great. We should we all just need to find our hobby triggers. Yes. That is the that is what we're trying to tell where did the listeners find her. Happy triggers like airbrushing which I'm gonna go back to immediately after this is over. Yeah. Well, I remember when like the the main reason I was upset when Chris Pratt and Paris is broke up. The reason I thought like I had them in my mind as a celebrity couple that I like they were my ride or die is because he talked about French braiding her hair every night before bed because it's something her mom used to do and I was like that is the most romantic sensual intimate experience I've ever heard of in my life and it's true that like, you know, someone fixing your hair for you before bed is so intimate and something that like, you know, generally we don't do for one another as adults. So go find somebody's hair to braid is what I'm saying. Yeah. It's like be childlike again in that way being like soft and sensitive to other people. Yeah of coloring books. Yes. Yeah Millennials are on that. We're like bringing back childhood. Yeah, Play-Doh slime is a huge ASMR. Yeah, like what's that about? If not, I'm going to be four again. Really the squishiness like the yeah. I like really clear clean crisp crisp sounds that I associate with things. I like. Yeah. The other thing was that when I talk to all these people I always ask them. Like what question do you most want to answer since there's so little research search at this point like, you know, what's the next big thing coming for you? And so they all had different things like, you know, one of the things was about cultural differences like mukbang like we've already talked about but you know, they also said like the hand movements thing is a big one. One of the things is that people really want to nail it down. The mechanisms behind ASMR. Right? Like we have some of these kind of early studies about showing an association with like your nervous system and your heart rate, but like what's actually going on in that kind of cascade where you start to feel that pleasant experience? Other people want to come up with a formal classification system sort of the way that like synesthesia has been divided into several types and you can test for them really accurately. So we're you know, that would require moving beyond this kind of binary of like, yes, no misophonia and identifying subtypes, but then the one I thought was the coolest was Nick Davis the guy who was very scared of ASMR in his University Computer. He was like, I just want to know why the scalp is involved. He was like the scalp has almost no sensory receptors. And he was like, it just doesn't make any sense that that is so often where the ASMR Cascade begins from like an anatomical perspective and that blew me away. Yeah, that's so fascinating. So many things left to look into what I love so much about this package is that like there's so much information in it, but there's also so much that we don't know yet and so many questions left to answer and and work to look forward to so definitely pick up a copy of the pop side noise issue. It's on newsstands now, it has a big bull Soon on it not just great stuff on and some iron hear amazing stories about mysterious unsolved sounds throughout history and animals making impossible to hear impossible to ignore noises. Why our baby cries impossible to ignore? That's a question. We answer if only in this issue also, we talked about totally silent Chambers, which are so creepy. It's so scary as scary as ASMR sounds for me. Me also I love that. One of our cover lines is the rowdiest a big frog on Earth. I edited that one and actually owned or wrote that one as well. Yeah, so pick it up. Yeah was developed very important to me. Got to every member of my family. I they bought an issue and I just kept opening up and be like, did you read the simlish one? So we should end in similar is right. Yeah add up again. Goodbye. It's too much like a real word. I know I know it's so hard to do they're doing is they talk about got a Buddha but uh, they they talk about like a specific word that they use. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's also I love it. Yeah, and it became the equivalent of Aloha General happy greeting. But if it's Aloha, it can also mean could by SOL, SOL, SOL, SOL, SOL, SOL, SOL. Thank you so much for listening. Let us know. Through the usual channels let you thought of this episode you can send us a voice message. You can talk to us on our Facebook group. You can tweet us at weirdest underscore thing and we'll be back next week with a usual episode. Thanks for listening weirdos. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast where available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now, and if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes, it helps other weirdos find the show, you can buy our merch including weirdest thing t-shirts tote bags and much. At Pop side dot thread list.com our show is produced by all of our hosts including me Rachel feltman and our editors just Bode and Jason Letterman or theme music is by Billy Kaden if you have questions suggestions or weird stories to share tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening weirdos.
This week, we have a very special episode all about the science behind the autonomous sensory meridian response, a.k.a. ASMR. While people who experience ASMR feel extremely pleasant and satisfying tingles when hearing their trigger sounds—which often include hair brushing, nail tapping, chewing, and whispering—another group can hear the same sounds and become filled with anxiety and rage. Eleanor, Rachel, and Amy dig into Eleanor's feature package all about these phenomena, which appears in the winter issue of Popular Science. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories! If you want to see us in your town, click here to take our listener survey! 