Department of Philosophy, New York University, Broadway Block, 5 Washington Pl, New York, NY, 10003, United States. Electronic address: dylanludwig@nyu.edu.
2 papers in the library · 10 citations · publishing 2024-2025
ASMR, a sensory-emotional experience first named in online forums, shows mounting psychological and neural evidence of a consistent set of triggers, experiential properties, and downstream effects. Psychological instruments now measure it. Despite its nonscientific origins, ASMR is a good candidate for being a real kind in cognitive sciences due to a robust causal profile and possible adaptive evolutionary history. Understanding its distinctive phenomenal experience can illuminate the functions of consciousness and challenge certain cognitive theories. ASMR warrants more extensive scientific investigation, including potential therapeutic applications.
A novel working hypothesis proposes that conscious experiences enable a variety of functional capacities that differ across psychological tasks, individuals, and species—a view called functional pluralism. Examining emotional processing, the paper consolidates evidence from vision science experiments (masking and suppression of emotional stimuli) and clinical research on Generalized Anxiety Disorder to compare unconscious and conscious emotional processes. Conscious experiences are argued to facilitate emotion-specific functions, including enhanced representation of fine-grained evaluative information, inhibition, and flexible responses, contrary to leading theories of consciousness that assume a single function.