is it just me...

[sciatrix]

or is the venn diagram of "people who are really into asmr" and "people who are neurodiverse" a pretty overlapping one?

This observation brought to you by this breathless article on how ASMR became a sensation, which has me so, so confused: that sensation is something I've experienced for a long, long time, and is just... an everyday part of being, for me. The way he has to work at it so hard is just alien. I was talking about the sensation a long time before ASMR, the vocabulary staple, came up, in little bits and bobs of "yeah, you know that thing" (I used to call it a tuning-fork sensation), and as I remember it I was usually talking to people in communities with a lot of folks on the autism spectrum. The people I have run into who are way into ASMR have also pinged me in the same kind of way for other reasons.

Is this a thing anyone has bothered to look at or work out? It seems like such an obvious thing that I'm a little shy mentioning it.

Comments

[viggorlijah]

I get full-body shivers from live classical music and people singing certain types of music. When I was little, it was much much easier to trigger the sensation in a variety of audio stimulations, but hypervigilence has blocked it so I have to be relaxed to get it.

I wanted to email you about what's a good book or article on autism for women? I'm leery of the Simon Baron-Cohen autism theory which seems very gendered and I'm curious about autism and neurodivergence when someone presents capable but it takes tremendous effort. Like, if I could I would eat basically the same meals for the rest of my life happily but I force myself to rotate different foods because that's What Is Good and Appropriate. And I'm seeing the same signs in my youngest child. We would like to wear PJs and have a fidget toy and live in the woods and arrange all our things by colour and just be left alone, okay. But we can act normal, it's just a considerable effort. Is it an effort for other people? I don't know! Other people seem to manage.

[archangelbeth]

My offspring would probably tell you that sounds like "masking," where autistic people work really hard to fake "normality." It's a huge stress and can cause some to hit a burnout state.

So, yeah, it's an effort for a lot of autistic people, and probably some other kinds of neuro-atypical, but the neurotypicals don't have to expend that effort, no...

If that helps!