Sleeping With ASMR

If you’ve been reading the Procrastination Pen for a while you will have come across the theory that people have a much more gentle and quiet approach to examinations when dealing with small people.

What could be better to test if this is consistent or just an occasional occurrence than to occasionally feature an examination with a small person and to observe whether such videos are better in terms of volume and method.

Universities have so far been pretty good for videos but they are also often a huge source of self-promotional material involving MGM style soundtracks and Saachi and Saachi motivational messages. There is, therefore, a mass of material to look at and quite a lot of it is unsuitable for us.

The University of Leicester though, in common with Warwick University, who we saw before,  has a number of teaching videos and some of those are very good. Today’s video is sadly very brief at just shy of five minutes in duration.

Paediatric Clinical Examinations – The Abdomen

It includes comments and as expected a number of the comments are not helpful. Reading between the lines though, I think ASMR fans are here well before I am. This is something that we have come to expect now.

It is a professional video and so of course it has notes associated with it:

“30 Jul 2014

This is a real-time demonstration illustrating the technique and parent and child interaction involved in the examination of the abdominal system of a child.

The film was produced by a paediatrician to aid the teaching of clinical examination skills. It starts where the history has been taken, and the clinical examination is about to commence.

Written and presented by Dr Elaine Carter, Emeritus Consultant Paediatrician, MA, MB ChB, MRCP, FRCPCH, MMedSci.

This film was produced by External Relations, University of Leicester.

Filmed & Edited by Carl Vivian

Written & Produced by Elaine Carter”

There is no – I mean zero – music at the start of the video – Warwick take note. This is such a welcome difference.

We are introduced to mum Sophie and her son Alex, who, it has to be said, looks suitably anxious. There is limited background noise; no obvious air conditioning noises for example.

The presentation is lovely and gentle. So far, the theory about small people is vindicated yet again.

I never expected a child to be this calm when having his abdomen probed in such a deep manner. Perhaps the presentation is just a little loud but that is a minor criticism and is only possible because other aspects of the video are so right.

Interestingly, I found the video is now in the Internet Archive the first time I have ever found that to be the case.

The video is posted eight years ago to this channel: University of Leicester.

This channel is simply huge, 1.3K videos at the date I am looking at it. Eighty-seven playlists and few of these are anything that we could use.

However searching the Internet Archive, discovered earlier, we find that Elaine is also involved in another video of a similar type.

This video, as luck would have it, is also present on YouTube:

Paediatric Clinical Examinations – The Respiratory System

This one seems to have been filmed before the previous one in that this is the first time we are introduced to Alex.

Again, there are notes: “30 Jul 2014

This is a real-time demonstration illustrating the technique and parent and child interaction involved in the examination of the respiratory system of a child.

The film was produced by a paediatrician to aid the teaching of clinical examination skills. It starts where the history has been taken, and the clinical examination is about to commence.

Written and presented by Dr Elaine Carter, Emeritus Consultant Paediatrician, MA, MB ChB, MRCP, FRCPCH, MMedSci.

This film was produced by External Relations, University of Leicester.

Filmed & Edited by Carl Vivian

Written & produced by Elaine Carter”

As before there is no startup music. If it wasn’t the fact that there would be so little material to work with, I would only select videos that lacked startup music (and tail end music as well for that).

We are also introduced to Ellie, Alex’s sister, Alex looks suitably bored, possibly because his sister is the focus of attention in this video.

It is another brief one at just less than six- and three-quarter minutes.

The presentation style here, if anything, is quieter than with the previous video. Ellie seems calm, even happy at intervals.

The comments are variable as always but again reading between the lines this is also already known to the ASMR community.

That’s it for this time.

The University of Leicester playlist on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The overall playlist of videos covered so far on the Procrastination Pen is here:

The videos weeded out because over time they are just not as good as the others is in this archive list:

I keep this in case subscribers to the Procrastination Pen have personal favourites that they want to hear.

The playlist of videos requiring age verification is here:

I can’t be bothered to stop my listening to log on, this interrupts the experience. You may not mind this in which case this list is for you.

I hope that you find the playlists restful and I hope you get plenty of sleep.

If you liked this blog article, why not follow this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by Mikhail Tyrsyna on Unsplash