Friday, June 01, 2018

John Goodman's ASMR commercial

I thought I saw John Goodman doing a commercial for McDonald's that was a parody of ASMR videos but I didn't stop long enough to really examine it - and now it seems it has been taken down. 

But it was definitely an ASMR take - as this McDonald's tweet confirmed.


This Reddit page shows the video.

The New Yorker posted a video and article about ASMR yesterday. I gather from the video that the science of ASMR hasn't advanced since I first discovered the term ASMR three and a half years ago. It's still a bunch of speculation, it seems.

I did my part - a few years before I started this blog I contacted Oliver Sachs to tell him about my unnamed head-spine sensation but he had no interest in exploring the phenomenon and just said "enjoy it." Which, well duh, that's the only thing you can do. I was really surprised that Sachs had such little interest in it, but maybe he had spent all those years with people who had odd experiences they were trying to fix, so he was focused on fixing things, and nobody was asking Sachs to fix ASMR.

I haven't experienced a full-blown ASMR event since probably around the time I discovered the term ASMR, but if I could trigger it, like the lucky people who are triggered by the ASMR videos, I would do it all the time. And if science could figure out how to trigger it, ASMR would be a possible non-drug alternative to anti-anxiety or pain medication.

Anyways, I thought it was amusing that someone in the New Yorker ASMR video says, around minute 5:30 "I don't think ASMR is mainstream at this point, I think it's going there..."

If McDonald's is making commercials that mimic ASMR videos I think it's time to say it's gone mainstream.