A Writing Retreat for Everyone?

I never imagined I'd see the subject of ASMR make an appearance on a blog about deep work, but that day has come, in the form of a Cal Newport post titled, "On Technology and Focus: ASMR, VR, and the First Steps Toward Immersive Single Tasking."

Newport describes ASMR -- of which the painter Bob Ross is something of a patron saint -- as follows:

Around 2010, a curious new term arose in obscure but energetic internet chatrooms: autonomous sensory meridian response. ASMR, as it was soon abbreviated, described a peculiar form of paresthesia experienced as a tingling that starts in the scalp and then moves down the back. It's often triggered by specific sounds, like soft whispering or a paintbrush scraping canvas. Not surprisingly, those sensitive to ASMR sometimes found Bob Ross reruns to be a reliable source of the effect.

What makes ASMR relevant to our interests here is that it happened to emerge as a topic of discussion just as YouTube emerged as a cultural force. Soon a cottage industry arose of AMSR videos featuring meticulously recorded trigger sounds. One such video opens on a straw stirring seltzer water. A little later it zooms in on a knife scraping dried blush on a make-up tray. It's been viewed over four and a half million times.

Newport notes that there is now a sub-genre, the ASMR room, in which mostly static shots of rooms with calming sounds are used to "invoke a sense of meditative calm and focus."

I am listening to Newport's first example of one of these now: It's an image of Charles Dickens's Victorian writing room, in which the only motion is from the flames of the fireplace and the rain outside. (See the embedded video below.) The sound is a nice overlay of crackling flames on a background of falling rain.

Two things interest me about this. First, although I do not experience ASMR and did not know about these "rooms," I have found soundtracks of background noise -- some like this -- useful when working. The sound both distracts me from tinnitus and provides low, constant background noise, including of such venues as coffee shops at times I can't or don't want to go to one. Second, I have also experimented with them for meditation or napping. So the ASMR rooms are a new source of such material for me.

But one of Newport's readers goes a step further than I did:

[S]he plays the video full screen on her computer while positioning a word processor document in front of it. She listens to the stereo sound in high quality noise cancelling headphones. Though she works out of a "small and noisy urban flat," the video and sounds help her fall into a state of concentration when she needs to write.

Newport thinks this reader is onto something, and goes on to make interesting speculations as to how to expand on the idea of such "rooms" using virtual reality technology.

My mental shorthand for this exciting family of possibilities is per the title, or even Man Caves for Everyone. Both somewhat imperfectly capture the idea of every Tom, Dick, and Harry having access, thanks to capitalism, to his own personal, customized retreat for deep work of nearly any description.

-- CAV