ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. A way to beat insomnia and reduce stress, ASMR is a relaxed, tingling feeling that many people report having as a response to particular stimuli, such as close personal attention, tapping, or whispering. Idiot's Guides: ASMR offers a clear explanation of its benefits, different trigger types, and how to experience its effects. Bonus content includes exclusive interviews with the top ASMR artists and online video content.

This book is open access under a CC BY license. This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest’s presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributions ranging from investigations of daydreaming and mindwandering, through histories of therapeutic relaxation and laziness, and creative-critical pieces on lullabies and the Sabbath, to experimental methods to measure aircraft noise and track somatic vigilance in urban space. The essays are grouped by scale of enquiry, into mind, body and practice, allowing readers to draw new connections across apparently distinct phenomena. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, life sciences, arts and humanities.

A user-friendly guide to ASMR—the stress-reducing, sleep-inducing, tingly sensation you have to try!— featuring step-by-step instructions on ASMR best practices for home and professional use alike. The calming feeling when someone gently brushes your hair. The deep comfort and connection you feel when a friend whispers in your ear. The tingly sensation experienced from the personal attention of a hairdresser, a clinician, or even watching and listening to Bob Ross… That feeling has a name! ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response (a deeply relaxing sensation with delightful head tingles that typically begin on the scalp and move down the spine) feels so good that some refer to it as a “brain-gasm.” ASMR videos on YouTube have millions of subscribers and billions of views. ASMR is truly everywhere—from ad campaigns to celebrities to millions of regular people looking for a moment of “ahhhh.” With Brain Tingles, it’s now possible to stimulate—and even share—those feel-good tingles every day, and in real life! ASMRUniversity.com founder Craig Richard, PhD, explains what ASMR is, why it happens, and how to trigger it at home. No special training or fancy equipment required! Inside, you’ll learn the most common auditory, visual, and tactile triggers and how to create person-to-person ASMR scenarios (from a mock eye exam to a pretend manicure) with a partner, client, or friend. The end result? That calming, tingly euphoria that can be used for comfort, relaxation, restfulness, or even to set the tone for sleep—on demand! With a textured cover you can rub, stroke, or scratch to use as a tactile trigger, Brain Tingles is the ultimate ASMR tool, inside and out.

This new health atlas of Japan presents a series of maps about the health of the contemporary Japanese population, i.e. detailed maps of health indicators in small areas using cartograms. This is the first comprehensive small-area based health atlas about contemporary Japan using vital statistics from 1995-2014. Each map is supplemented with concise explanations written by leading epidemiologists and health geographers in Japan. The book employs various cutting-edge methods in spatial epidemiology, Bayesian spatial smoothing for the reliable mapping of mortality indices, advanced cartographic transformations using the concept of aerial cartograms, and summary statistics of socioeconomic health inequalities. The atlas highlights geographical aspects of social gradients in health by comparing mortality maps with distribution of deprivation index during the recent long-lasting economic stagnation period of Japan known as the lost decades. This health atlas will be a useful resource for international comparisons between Japan and other advanced countries in terms of health and related socioeconomic disparities between regions. It will be of interest to public health practitioners, administrators, researchers and students working on health geography and public health.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and crafting sound. This handbook is composed of six sections: sonic artifacts; sounds and the body; habitat and sound; sonic desires; sounds and machines; and overarching sensologies. The individual chapters explore exemplary research objects and put them in the context of methodological approaches, historical predecessors, research practices, and contemporary research gaps. This volume offers therefore one of the broadest, most detailed, and instructive overviews on current research in this area of sensory anthropology.

An entertaining, scientifically rigorous exploration of the social and biological effects of our wireless world The way we use i-technology is affecting our health and happiness. While programs, devices, information, and constant connectivity can offer us ease, liberation, and efficiency, they can also rewire our brains to feel restless, disconnected, unable to sleep, anxious, and depressed, with new illnesses like FOMO (fear of missing out), and electro sensitivities appearing. Engaging and entertaining yet scientifically rigorous, this fully revised and updated second edition of i-Minds comprehensively explores an era of screen-based technology's assimilation into our lives, pondering it as both godsend and plague. Addressing theory, popular media, and industry hype, i-Minds demonstrates: How constant connectivity is changing our brains The dangers of unchecked connectivity Positive steps to embrace new technologies while protecting our well-being and steering our future in a more human direction. i-Minds is a must-read for anyone interested in fostering health and happiness, or who is struggling with the role of screened technology in our lives.

This volume discusses the definitional problems and conceptual strategies involved in defining the human. By crossing the boundaries of disciplines and themes, it offers a transdisciplinary platform for exploring the new ideas of the human and adjusting to the dynamic in which we are plunged. The emerging cyborgs and transhumans call for an urgent reconsideration of humans as individuals and collectives. The identity of the human in the 21st century eludes definitions underpinned by simplifying and simplified dichotomies. Affecting all the spheres of life, the discoveries and achievements of recent decades have challenged the bipolar categorizations of human/nonhuman and human/machine, real/virtual and thus opened the door to transdisciplinary considerations. Ours is a new world where the boundaries of normality and abnormality, a legacy of the long history of philosophy, medicine, and science need dismantling. We are now on our way to re-examine, re-understand, and re-describe what normal-abnormal, human-nonhuman, and I-we-they mean. We find ourselves facing what resembles the liminal stage of a global ritual, a stage of being in-between—between the old anthropocentric order and a new position of blurred boundaries. The volume addresses philosophical, bioethical, sociological, and cognitive approaches developed to transcend the binaries of human-nonhuman, natural-artificial, individual-collective, and real-virtual.

We are entering a new era of architecture that is technologically enhanced, virtual and synthetic. Contemporary architects operate in a creative environment that is both real and digital; mixed, augmented and hybridised. This world consists of ecstasies, fears, fetishisms and phantoms, processes and spatiality that can best be described as Surrealist. Though too long dormant, Surrealism has been a significant cultural force in modern architecture. Founded by poet André Breton in Paris in 1924 as an artistic, intellectual and literary movement, architects such as Le Corbusier, Diller + Scofidio, Bernard Tschumi and John Hejduk realised its evocative powers to propel them to 'starchitect' status. Rem Koolhaas most famously illustrated Delirious New York (1978) with Madelon Vriesendorp's compelling Surrealist images. Architects are now reviving the power of Surrealism to inspire and explore the ramifications of advanced technology. Architects' studios in practices and schools are becoming places where nothing is forbidden. Architectural languages and theories are 'mashed' together, approaches are permissively appropriated, and styles are not mutually exclusive. Projects are polemic, postmodern and surreally media savvy. Today's architects must compose space that operates across the spatial spectrum. Surrealism, with its multiple readings of the city, its collage semiotics, its extruded forms and artificial landscapes, is an ideal source for contemporary architectural inspiration. Contributors include: Bryan Cantley, Nic Clear, James Eagle, Natalie Gall, Mark Morris, Dagmar Motycka Weston, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Shaun Murray, Anthony Vidler, and Elizabeth Anne Williams. Featured architects: Nigel Coates, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Perry Kulper, and Mark West.

The prevalence of diabetes has alarmingly increased in both developed and developing countries in recent years. The prevalence of different complications and comorbid conditions associated with diabetes has also rampantly increased, thereby endangering the lives of patients with diabetes. In fact, obesity, which is associated with diabetes, is currently a major global public health concern. Nevertheless, it can be argued that little progress has been made in the field of the management of diabetes during the past decades, and many believe that the discovery of insulin was not followed by further significant advancements in the management of diabetes. Diagnostic and screening approaches to diabetes have considerably evolved in recent decades. Saccharometers are replaced by glucometers and elaborated laboratory techniques. However, there are still limitations to such technologies, and they cannot be used on large scales, and, in pediatric endocrinology, they are not well complied with. In fact, it may be argued that the progress we have made in the management of diabetes has mainly focused on the invention of more efficient insulin preparations and improved techniques for its delivery.