Tag: University of Leicester

Sleeping With ASMR

In the drive to create the perfect night-time companion (I mean the Procrastination Pen playlist rather than any other type of companion that might have sprung to mind), I sometimes weed out so many videos that it all looks like a roadside verge when the strimmer operator has been a little too enthusiastic.

Added to this is a high rate of attrition, which shows that as fast as I write about videos, people are then taking them down. Given that some of them might be being taken down due to legal reasons (such as copyright offences), it would be unwise of me to keep copies of such videos to re-upload them again (or I might find the entire Procrastination Pen YouTube channel quietly disappears).

One day I may tire of maintaining the blog, and the YouTube channel, (and the Facebook page, and so on and so forth) but I’d rather like that decision to be mine, not imposed by a copyright official at YouTube.

I’ve been weeding the playlist recently, such that the Procrastination Pen archive playlist is quite healthy in size and the Procrastination Pen main playlist (the reason we’re all here I assume) is a bit smaller. Quite enough to act as a restful companion, perhaps not quite long enough to sustain many more YouTube video take-downs.

To this end, I need to get ahead and post a few more blog posts and fill that playlist up again. Apologies if on such occasions you are notified of more blog posts than you are keen to read in the timescale. If you are short of time, scroll right to the end of this blog post and find the Procrastination Pen playlist there. Flit over to YouTube, pull up the playlist, engage shuffle, lay back, and relax.

If you’re still reading, this is today’s video:

Abdominal Examination – Explanation

It is from a university and so one assumes a professional video. As such it has notes:

“768,069 views  14 Dec 2011  Clinical Examinations

A second video can be found at; http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/msce…

This is a detailed explanation of the abdominal examination illustrating technique and patient interaction.

The film was produced by practising clinicians to aid the teaching of clinical examination skills. It starts at the point when the clinician has finished taking the medical history and begins the clinical examination.

Presented by Mr Adam Scott MS FRCS (Edin) FRCS (Eng) Consultant General and Colorectal Surgeon. Produced and Directed by Dr Irene Peat FRCR FRCP, Dr Nicholas Port MBChB BSc and Jon Shears.

More Clinical Examination materials can be found at; http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/msce…”

I love it when we get details about participants – it makes the video so much more believable  i.e. less likely the participants are making a professional ASMR video and masquerading as medical professionals to do so.

Mr Adam Scott is referenced in several websites and so unless those ASMR professionals are getting really great at subterfuge we can be very happy that this is the real thing.

Sadly, the URL that purports to lead to further videos leads just to the University of Leicester website so I am guessing the page, where those videos were, has now gone.

The video itself is just less than eight and a half minutes and so not huge in terms of videos that we are used to.

The patient is introduced as “Debbie”. Immediately Mr Scott is quiet, methodical, patient and not overly energetic. All-in-all what we would look for in a presenter of relaxing night-time videos.

There is a background noise (perhaps air conditioning) but not as terrible as some we have heard.

The channel on which this video appears: University of Leicester is huge, it has twelve hundred videos at the time I am looking at it. It seems very unlikely that it will be feasible to ferret out the gold from amongst all the other videos. Those promoting the university, covering other disciplines taught by the university, students wanting to try their hand at video-making, and so on.

I think the approach here is to look for Adam Scott MS FRCS (Edin) FRCS (Eng) Consultant General and Colorectal Surgeon (I would search for “Adam Scott” but sadly this is not an uncommon name).

The results of such a specific search on YouTube is that we have only five videos of which in overview only one more is suitable for our purposes:

Abdominal Examination – Demonstration

This is four- and three-quarter minutes so even shorter than the last one and is pretty much the same in all respects. One of the great things is the lack of introductory music, which is not missed in any sense whatsoever.

It would be even more great if there was an absence of background noise.

There are notes: “1,206,417 views 14 May 2012 Clinical Examinations

This is a real-time demonstration illustrating technique and patient interaction involved in the Abdominal Examination. The film was produced by practising clinicians to aid the teaching of clinical examination skills. It starts at the point when the clinician has finished taking the medical history and begins the clinical examination. Presented by Dr Adam Scott MS FRCS (Edin) FRCS (Eng) Consultant General and Colorectal Surgeon. Produced and Directed by Dr Irene Peat FRCR FRCP, Dr Nicholas Port MBChB BSc and Jon Shears. More Clinical Examination materials can be found at; http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/msce…”

The video basically covers much of the ground of the previous video so it isn’t new material.

Then there are three videos whose descriptions lead me to suspect that they are promotional in nature:

Bowel Cancer Signs and Symptoms

This appears on the channel: Spire Leicester Hospital.

This has just twenty subscribers so a lot more niche than we are used to.

The notes here are: “416 views 19 Apr 2018

Spire Leicester Hospital Colorectal surgeon Mr Adam Scott talks about bowel cancer, the signs and symptoms, bowel screening and when to visit your GP. https://www.spirehealthcare.com/spire…”

Although this is a presentation, Mr Scott has a great voice and I would be tempted to include this video in the playlist. However, I suspect that people may well find this off-putting (it is a scary subject).

The URL referenced in the notes simply redirects to Spire Leicester Hospital.

The Channel has only five videos and it does not appear to have any material that we can use for night-time relaxation.

The next video (and the one after that) both appear on a channel: PPM Software. This has one subscriber and three videos of which Mr Adam Scott makes up two of those – to me this appears to be promotional material.

The first video is just half a minute:

‘PPM’ Software, Client Testimonial

There is funky music – uuurrrgh.

The recording is loud with loud background music and of course it is very short, not the sort of thing we’re looking for at all.

The next video is more of the same:

‘PPM’ Software, What our Clients say

This repeats the above almost exactly but is twice as long. It is designed to sell a product and I do not think we can make use of it at all. This one isn’t for the Procrastination Pen playlist.

So, two videos for the playlist. Just enough to create a playlist for Leicester University.

However, if the quality is this good, I think we’ll be back with Leicester university again in the near future.

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 experience to log on, this interrupts the listening 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 Vera Barus on Unsplash

Sleeping With ASMR

As the search for YouTube videos with relaxing content continues, I have begun to build up a bit of a backlog. There are a great many more articles in the draft stage than you have actually seen. There are also many YouTube URLs which I have seen in passing and noted, in case they might be worthy of future investigation.

I am hopeful that if any life disasters happen this will mean that you still get regular content. If I disappear suddenly, you know that I was wrong.

It is sometimes good to come back to the more formal approach of educational institution videos. In general, these have slightly higher (sometimes much higher) sound quality. They frequently have less extraneous noises and, given they are part of a course of education, there is sometimes a nice helpful playlist for evaluation. Many of the members of which may prove to be suitable for our purposes.

Today’s is from a university and as with previous university videos covered by the Procrastination Pen, I have high hopes. It was Warwick where we found the excellent Dr James Gill, for example.

Neurological Examination of the Limbs – Explanation

Judging by the comments, a number of ASMR fans have happened upon this one before.

Posted eleven years ago, the actual video quality is not exactly HD. However, the comments indicate that it is highly relaxing.

As we have seen, professionally prepared videos frequently have very informative notes associated with them and so it is here:

“8 May 2012 Clinical Examinations

This is a detailed explanation of the Neurological Examination of the Limbs illustrating technique and patient interaction.

The film was produced by practising clinicians to aid the teaching of clinical examination skills. It starts at the point when the clinician has finished taking the medical history and begins the clinical examination.

Presented by Dr Peter Critchley MD FRCP Consultant Neurologist. Produced and Directed by Dr Irene Peat FRCR FRCP, Dr Nicholas Port MBChB BSc and Jon Shears.

More Clinical Examination materials can be found at; http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/msce…”

Sadly, the link to further clinical examination videos appears not to work. Otherwise, I can imagine it might have been a resource for future review in this blog.

At twenty and three-quarter minutes it is longer than many we have featured of late.

It starts without music (which is a cause for much celebration) – simply a title page. Dr Peter Critchley has a good voice for our purposes. The approach is methodical and quiet. It is broken into sections with educational notes in the video itself at intervals. It is doubtful that you will profit from this if you are using the video in order to fall asleep. The “patient” is Jake.

The channel is University of Leicester. There are one thousand two hundred videos so it is hard to see how to review them, filter them or otherwise manage them. There are eighty five playlists, some of them containing a great many videos.

This seems to be a channel that is worthy of future attention.

In this case though, I felt we would focus on the medical professional and searched for Dr Peter Critchley (via YouTube search).  A number of irrelevant videos were located this way. However, there is one other (closely related) Dr Peter Critchley video:

Neurological Examination of the Limbs – Demonstration

Again, this has a healthy set of comments and it is the first time in which I have seen the person in the video himself leave a comment. He is Jake Albon. And of course, he has a channel. Jake may be the subject of future review perhaps.

The video also has a healthy set of notes:

“14 Dec 2011  Clinical Examinations

This is a real-time demonstration illustrating technique and patient interaction involved in the Neurological Examination of the Limbs.

The film was produced by practising clinicians to aid the teaching of clinical examination skills. It starts at the point when the clinician has finished taking the medical history and begins the clinical examination.

Presented by Dr Peter Critchley MD FRCP Consultant Neurologist. Produced and Directed by Dr Irene Peat FRCR FRCP, Dr Nicholas Port MBChB BSc and Jon Shears.

For further information visit our Leicester Medical School (link https://le.ac.uk/medicine)”

The above URL is functional but it is not obviously a source of further videos.

The video is just over nine and a half minutes, so somewhat shorter than the first one in this article. It follows exactly the same material and so the comments for the first video in this blog article still apply including the lack of funky music. Please, more video recording persons do this.

I’ll include this one in the Procrastination Pen playlist, but if you play that list in order this could become rather dull. I therefore strongly recommend that you use the shuffle function on YouTube. However, should this video annoy you, by all means feedback and I will consider removing it from the playlist.

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

The Procrastination Pen playlist (which is no-doubt what you have all been reading this in order to locate) is found here:

I have been listening to this playlist most nights and some of the videos that were members have now been removed. If any of your favourites are missing from that main playlist you can find them here in the archive list:

Quite often the videos getting removed have no faults other than occasional intrusive noises.

The playlist of items that are great for ASMR (but contain an age verification function), usually a great way to interrupt your listening in the middle of the night, is here:

I hope that you find the playlists restful and that you get a good night’s sleep.

Hope to see you again back here for the next blog article.

If you liked this blog item, why not subscribe to this blog.

Until next time.

Photo by Shona Macrae