Relax to the crunchy close up sounds of some of the most crunchy foods
of Costa Rica. We'll begin with slow crinkly sounds by preparing to open
some banana chips, cookie, nuts or amaranth bar. We'll finish with some
salt rain.
This ASMR eating video is made by using a binaural
microphone so please use your headphones. It is soft spoken with
occasional whispers for deep relaxation.
"Hello everyone! This ASMR collaboration features: my attempt at being a
Foley artist, soft speaking, whispering, breathing, spray sounds, scalp
massage sounds, pausing, repetition of trigger words and sounds,
uncapping, and the awesome charm and grace of the one and only
albinwhisperland! I hope you'll all give ALB a warm welcome to our
little nook on Youtube, and please don't hesitate to visit her
channel. She makes some pretty great ASMR videos...I love how she taps
on stuff...that would sound weird anywhere but in the ASMRverse :P. So
ALB gave me some lovely video footage that triggered me without any
audio, she gave me the product list she used, and the steps for the
look. It was my job to narrate and make some sound effects in Foley
fashion---so hopefully it will look like ALB was actually making the
sounds in the video...it's a lot harder than you might think it is!
Props to Foley artists, and Happy Viewing!"
This
is another one of the videos we play almost daily and simply had to
share. Dream like whispers and sounds blend together in a simply perfect
manor. As far as ASMR artists go this has got to be one of the most
talented?
Anyway, enough of us talking. Sit back, put your headphones on and enjoy the tingles!
Gently caressing your ears with soft softers while whispering english and italian triggers words.
This is one of our favourite asmr currently. Sit back, put on a pair of headphones and enjoy the amazing array of triggers and whispers DiannaDew has put together on this blissful video.
Hello everybody, so welcome to a video of pure mouth sounds. It has been
highly requested for quite a while now, so I hope that you enjoy :)
*This video is designed for the purposes of ASMR and relaxation. If
you're wondering what I was looking at in the distance, I was just
checking the microphone levels on the laptop and also to check on my cat
who decided to wander around during the video :)
Please enjoy this ASMR tribute to ear attention. I'm still a little
tired and rough around the edges, but I wanted to get back to making
videos as soon as possible. Thanks for sticking with me and I hope you
like this earful of love.
Giving you some love with an herbal bubble bath. It's filled with water
sounds, a squishy sponge head massage, popping bubbles, flickering
candles, crispy plant sounds, bottle tapping and binural tingle triggers
with soft speaking and whispers. I hope it will relax you to optimum
levels of tranquility:) Love, Comic Tingles
***Wear headphones for
ASMR effect-pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or
peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile,
olfactory, or cognitive stimuli.
Autonomous
sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a neologism for a perceptual
phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation
in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response
to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli. The
nature and classification of the ASMR phenomenon is controversial,[1]
with strong anecdotal evidence to support the phenomenon but little or
no scientific explanation or verified data
When
I was a young boy, I remember having these experiences where I would
listen to the radio on the bed. I would have my head pressed right up
against it as I lay there, taking in every word – to the point where it
actually left deep grooves in the side of my head (they went away
eventually, don’t worry).
I also clearly remember when I was about eight or so, sitting outside
in the sun on the back porch, near the pool, listening to the old
gardener we used to have years ago whistle while he worked. I was just
so caught up in the moment, and had these intense tingling sensations
just flow from my head.
This was the beginning of a life-long journey that would bring me to
my most recent discoveries, and attempts to try and get behind the
origin of this seemingly undocumented phenomenon – something that I had
taken for granted for years, and hadn’t known if anyone else had ever had the same feeling.
I continued to have these sensations throughout my childhood, my
teenage years, and in to adulthood. It was only in 2009 that I searched
for something related for the first time online, even though I'd had the
internet for years, and came across a forum where people were
discussing this exact thing: a strange, but pleasurable feeling that
felt like tingles in the head – which some described as akin to an
orgasm or perhaps being on a high after recreational drug use. Some
addicts who also experience these sensations claim it even rivals
Ecstasy or “E” as far as the effects are concerned.
I naturally read through this two-part series of threads where people
talked about it, and gave their opinions on what it was, and what
caused it. Not only that but I began to search for other threads similar
in topic, and also began to actively try and experience this sensation
more and more often. One thing I did was to start collecting audio
clips, watch video clips online, listen to the radio, and watch certain
programs on TV that were dead certs – that is to say, guaranteed to
create this head tingling sensation.
ASMR and Other Terms
I
started to plan a blog, which I felt would be part of a pioneering
effort in a niche which had up to that point been untapped – or so it
seemed. It was early in 2010 that I finally unleashed The Unnamed
Feeling blog upon the internet: a blog that is dedicated to news,
commentary, theories, and the sharing of stories as regards my
experiences with this phenomenon. This unexplained thing first became
known as AIHO (Attention-Induced Head Orgasm), then AIE
(Attention-Induced Euphoria) – for those looking for a less sexual
approach, and also brought about several other acronyms like ASMR
(Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) – probably one of the more widely
used, as well as others. Some casual or humourous terms for it include
braingasms, headgasms, and WHS (Weird Head Sensation).
At the moment, there’s my blog, UNF, or The Unnamed Feeling, the ASMR
Facebook Group, the ASMR Twitter page, YouTube channel as well as the
ASMR Research and Support site and forums (check the sidebar for more
sites that are added from time to time). These are all linked together
in a network dedicated to sharing, discovering, researching, and
explaining this seemingly uncommon phenomenon. Currently there are many
who experience it worldwide - maybe some more frequently or intensely
than others. One thing is for sure: most of us have haven’t met another
experiencer in person; only via the internet.
"I
remember when I was eight, sitting outside near the pool, listening to
the old gardener whistle while he worked. I was just so caught up in the
moment, and had these intense tingling sensations just flow from my
head."
ASMR Triggers
So
how do you know if you happen to experience ASMR? A number of causes or
triggers are shared by people, which I will list here. If you happen to
have anything in common with these, then you might be an ASMR
"experiencer":
Listening to specific people talk (usually soft-spoken, well-spoken voices or lispers).
Listening to the radio or podcasts when these people are talking.
Watching certain TV programs, or YouTube videos, like instructional ones, infomercials, adverts, historical or factual programs.
People talking in a foreign or indigenous language, other than your own.
Getting tickled lightly, especially on the back or shoulders.
When someone strokes or plays with your hair softly.
Having your hair washed and cut at a salon.
When you listen to certain soft or distant, and usually
repetitive, sounds like a bouncing tennis ball, trickling water, or
construction noises like tapping hammers.
Listening to certain types of music – perhaps ambient or industrial, for instance, or songs with soft lyrics.
Watching someone draw a picture, paint, or build something, perhaps like a sculpture or even a card tower.
Watching someone write.
Someone drawing on your body.
People reading a newspaper over your shoulder.
People looking for something in their handbags.
Someone doing something very slowly and carefully.
People working at computers; perhaps the sound of keys being tapped or the click of a mouse.
Listening to someone chew gum.
Someone using sign language, or signing.
People whispering.
Listening to elderly people talk – the slow, methodical way they speak.
Listening to strangers talk, rather than family or friends and more well-known individuals in one’s life.
From reading various pieces of reading material.
Someone showing you how to do something.
Someone clipping their nails or using a nail file.
Some sceptics claim that ASMR is nothing more than goosebumps.
Symptoms
or side effects that might occur after or during the sensation which
might be caused by one or several of the above triggers, and experienced
by only some of the ASMR population, include:
A headache (usually just a slight one however).
Slight nausea.
Tiredness – probably due to the relaxing effects of the event.
Watering eyes at the conclusion of an event, probably because it ended!
Numbness in the fingers, reported by some.
Seeing visions and funny symbols, especially when eyes are closed.
Sadness or irritability when the event ends, with people claiming they “don’t want it to end”.
Temporary loss of motor functions or bodily control, such as not being able to form a tight fist.
Find ASMR apps, eBooks and mp3s here on the ASMR aStore!
Type A and Type B ASMR
One can also further divide ASMR in to two groups:
Type A: consciously controlled trigger of an ASMR event. Type B: uncontrolled or externally triggered ASMR event.
Type A would refer to an activity such as meditation, where the
person is alone, with nobody else around and no distractions, either.
They can make the sensation occur at will, just using the mind. They
don't rely on external stimuli.
Type B refers to watching TV, listening to the radio, or someone
speak, or being physically touched. This is what is meant by external
factors that trigger ASMR. It involves the senses. Type B ASMR
Experiencers may rely solely on one sense during an ASMR event, or may
use two or more at the same time, such as sight and hearing.
Some claim that Type B is the more common one as it is perhaps easier
to trigger, and may result in longer, more sustained events. Another
thing that I’ve noticed is that external triggers are much more likely
to enhance, or act as a boost to an all ready existing event. Even
climate effects such as the cold could add to the overall experience.
Stroking the skin on one’s arm while an ASMR event takes place also acts
as an “enhancer”.
With these Type B triggers, sometimes repetition of the trigger or
playing a video our sound clip on a loop can increase the sensation
drastically. It’s not unusual however to become immune or used to a
trigger after a while. It’s like you build up a tolerance level or
become bored with that sample, and this is when people start to seek out
more and more things that will create the sensation, often searching
for the ultimate in triggers. Sometimes one can not only build up a
tolerance to certain triggers, but might also stop experiencing ASMR
altogether, temporarily. It usually resumes after taking a break for a
while.
Type B experiencers might be able to experience Type A ASMR, and can
train themselves to do so. Just by thinking back to past events which
triggered ASMR, or imagining someone talking, perhaps a reliable inducer
(one who is able to trigger this response).
Potential Uses for ASMR
ASMR is used by people who suffer from insomnia to help induce sleep.
It is used by people suffering from stress as stress relief or a mood enhancer.
It can potentially be used as a form of alternative
medicine, such as a natural painkiller. People who experience ASMR have
noted that inducing ASMR helps them get rid of headaches and migraines,
for example.
Some
mistake this sensation for heebie-jeebies, chills, goose bumps or pins
and needles. But these are all usually associated with generally
negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, pain, or just being cold.
ASMR is generally experienced as a positive feeling, which usually
results in bouts of euphoria, with varying degrees of intensity, often
described as being similar to a tide sweeping in. It can fade in and
out, or can be a more constant feeling all over the cranium, spreading
to various other body parts on occasion. Naturally, seeing as this
sensation seems to originate at the head, it’s quite something if it can
reach all the way down to the legs or even the feet! That would
constitute a major event, especially if it’s a whole body sensation.
Not everyone reportedly experiences these tingling sensations in the
head and neck region however. Others claim that they experience negative
feelings or sensations, even pain from being exposed to certain
triggers, and it has been suggested that an underlying condition such as
misophonia might be involved.
Indeed it is a topic that not everyone understands – with people who
experience it often feeling alone, isolated, and misunderstood. Perhaps
they are even regarded as a freak or an outcast, particularly if the
subject is brought up with someone who doesn’t experience it. I’ve only
brought up the subject with a few people in my entire life, and was met
with either confusion or indifference most of the time. And I’ve read
many other stories where people reacted in much the same matter, even
recommending the poor fellow’s committal in one instance!
Generally speaking it seems to be something linked to people with
certain personality traits. Usually people who experience it are gentle
in nature, perhaps spiritual, deep, introspective, and maybe even
introverted. Creative or predominantly right-brained individuals might
also be more prone to experiencing it. This is because quite a few
people who tend to exhibit the symptoms happen to be artists or
musicians. This might just be coincidence though. I personally am
half-half: half logical (left brained) and half creative (right
brained). Dr Ane Axeford, a clinical hypnotist, suggests that people who
experience ASMR are HSPs (Highly Sensitive Person), or are more likely
to be HSPs. She claims that the typical personality of experiencers is
indicative of this. She goes further to say that we are more susceptible
to hypnotism. Indeed, there has been some speculation that the
psychological effects experienced are akin to a light form of hypnosis.
It seems to occur less and less as one gets older however, with
people reporting more intense and/or frequent ASMR events in their
youth. There’s been much debate over whether ASMR is hereditary. Some
are able to support this theory, claiming that several members of their
immediate families experience it. It has even been suggested that ASMR
is a reward system passed down through generations.
Some speculate that it is an evolutionary grooming response, and this
is partly supported by the fact that watching makeup videos and
hair-brushing videos on YouTube is popular among many experiencers. That
and going to the salon and having one’s hair cut and washed, or even
just someone playing with your hair, can trigger this response.
It is not known whether there have been scientific or medical studies
on this subject, or if there are proper terms for it. I’ve even spoken
to doctors, in real life and online, and even though some of them might
actively experience this, I’ve had word from one that there may well not
be much official research put into this – mainly because it’s hard to
explain, and not a pathology, like a disease such as cancer. This seems
to mean that it’s not as “important”.
There
have been several theories or opinions, such as a physical
consciousness of a serotonin release in the brain, or even endorphins.
What this means is that you can actually “feel” the chemicals being
released. Serotonin is thought to possibly be the precursor to ASMR, and
responsible for the feelings of well-being. Torsten Wiedemann,
ethnobotanist and member of the ASMR research team, who first put
forward the serotonin hypothesis, also supports the belief that ASMR is
non-sexual, seeing as he thinks dopamine, which is a chemical released
in the brain, brought on by feelings of arousal among other things, is
the anti-ASMR chemical, stopping ASMR from taking place.
Others include narcolepsy – a tendency to fall asleep in relaxed
situations. Some people who experience tingles have been diagnosed with
this condition. Whether this is coincidence or not is unknown. It seems
as though a lot of people, particularly those who suffer from insomnia,
use trigger videos to help them sleep. Some even think that ASMR is
linked to insomnia.
There's ESP (extrasensory perception), or another controversial one
is that the subjects are Indigo Children - evolved or evolving human
beings.
Another suggests that it is a synaesthesia, where one sense or part
of the body is stimulated, such as the eyes (sight), skin and scalp
(touch), ears (hearing), and less commonly smell and taste, and another
sense or part of the body is stimulated. Others deny this, however, and
say that synaesthesia has more to do with colours. However, there are
different types of synaesthesia, and at least one of them reportedly
involves tingling sensations being experienced.
There’s a highly controversial theory that suggests that ASMR is in
fact frisson or cold chills; musical chills. Some research has been
conducted on frisson, and after reading through a study on this, I came
across something that the two do seem to have in common – the fact that
they both invoke some sort of physical and psychological effects.
Frisson does result in flexing of the hair follicles, which is possibly
the tingling sensation experienced in both ASMR and frisson. However,
that is where the similarities end. ASMR and frisson responses are
generated by different triggers, and have different physical and
psychological effects. ASMR results in a relaxed state of mind, whereas
frisson often makes a person excited.
And then another theory suggests that it’s drug-induced, or that
drugs might increase the overall intensity of it. Some drugs like SSRIs
(Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors), which are often prescribed
for depression, are thought to lead to ASMR immunity, with alcohol
possibly having the same effect.
Naysayers and unsupportive types have suggested it’s something
negative and more serious, like an issue with the brain such as a tumour
or cancer, or they just label it as a fetish of sorts. But the most
hurtful is suggesting that it doesn't even exist.
That is why we have this network I mentioned earlier, as well as a
small core team, of which I am a member. The aim is to research this
phenomenon and document it, all the while creating a community for those
who wish to communicate with others who experience ASMR.
We are also very partial to sharing our personal stories related to the
topic and ASMR experiences with other members. The community could
still be regarded as small but growing, and consists of different
individuals that can ironically be grouped into a few different classes:
You have your ASMR experiencers, your non-ASMR experiencers who still
support the group, and lastly voyeurs. This last group is basically an
inside joke in the group, which really refers to people who are
interested in the topic and all, and will join in but probably don’t
experience it at all, or support much; people who just find the subject
fascinating. Not that we really mind that much though.
So if you are tired of feeling alone, sick of being accused of being
weird, and want to be part of the community, then don’t hesitate to
visit the websites I have listed here that deal with this subject.
I am sitting at my desk in a nearly
empty office on a December evening, feeling the sort of directionless
melancholy that tends to take hold as the holiday season sets in,
listening to a video of a gentle Russian woman whispering in my ear
about how much she cares about my relaxation.
“You are appreciated,” she says, making scratching noises into a
microphone so it sounds like she’s scratching my head. “I would like to
protect you, to comfort you, to help you relax and forget about your
trouble, whatever it is.”
I’ve got to be honest, it feels like a pretty weird and lonely thing to do.
But the video doesn’t work on me the way it’s supposed to. For many
of her fans, Maria’s voice causes a sensation the Internet has dubbed
ASMR—autonomous sensory meridian response. Those who get ASMR describe
the experience as a tingling inside their heads, or a head rush.
Sometimes the sensation extends down their backs or limbs. It’s often
referred to as a brain-gasm, but counterintuitively, it’s also supposed
to be relaxing, a mellow feeling. Some people watch the videos to help
them sleep at night. And even without the tingles, it is sort of
relaxing, if you can get past the dissonance of someone whispering in
your ear while you scroll through Twitter in your cubicle, or whatever.
Aside
from whispering, some of the other things that can trigger the
sensation include tapping or scratching sounds, the sound of rain, or
white noise. And it’s not just sounds: People report getting ASMR when
getting a haircut, or an ear exam—any kind of close, personal attention.
“Whenever they had lice checks in elementary school, I would feel
very relaxed, and would have the tingling sensation run from my head and
down my back,” Lee, who works for an advertising agency in New York
City, says of her first ASMR experience.
For John Skinner, a 23-year-old tutor in Chicago, his introduction to ASMR came from famously-fro’d TV painter Bob Ross.
“Every time I watched it, I would just completely zone out… I guess I
wouldn’t really call it sleepy, more just like very, very mellow,” he
says. And he’s not the only one—the subreddit for ASMR lists Bob Ross under “Common Triggers.”
Some people prefer accented voices—Maria is Russian, and moved to the
U.S. in 2006. When she heard I was interviewing Maria (YouTube name
“GentleWhispering”), Lee got excited. “She’s my favorite,” Lee said.
“It’s something about the way she pronounces consonants. Her P’s are
like cushiony pillows.”
Maria says that as soon as she got to the U.S., she began searching
for things that triggered her online. The videos she would find then
were often not intended to trigger ASMR—it might just be a video of
someone explaining something softly.
Then, “in 2009, I was going through a depression and I had a lot of
problems with anxiety,” Maria says. “I needed something to relax. On
YouTube I was watching hypnosis videos, some massage videos as well…then
I saw a link that said ‘whisper video.’”
For
around a year after that, she was just a viewer, watching the whisper
videos every day for hours. “I liked them so much and was so happy that I
found my people,” she says. “My depression totally disappeared.” Then
she started making videos herself.
People like Maria, who make YouTube videos for ASMR (they call
themselves ASMRtists), shape them around different triggers, to try to
appeal to different people. Maria has a video in which she plays with a
friend’s hair. Other “role-play” videos have a person pretending to do
your makeup, or give you an eye exam.
According to Maria, the way ASMR manifests is different for
everybody. First, there are two types, Type A and Type B. Those with
Type A are said to be able to cause ASMR through meditation, or just
thinking about a trigger, while Type Bs need to actually experience the
trigger. Maria also says that the tingles vary in strength.
“The
strongest type of tingle…feels like sparkles or little fireworks going
off,” she says. “The strongest one would give you the feeling of being
exhausted, pleasantly tired, satisfied almost you want to say. Then
there are much less strong tingles, and they feel just pleasant. Almost
like sand is being poured down your spine. [Or] like when you get the
funny elbow, when you hit it and it feels like it just goes off
everywhere.” Searches for "ASMR" over time. GoogleNeither
Lee nor Skinner had a name for this sensation until recently. “I just
thought it was a thing that everybody had,” Skinner says. The community
that has sprung up around this specific physical sensation is, perhaps
unsurprisingly, Internet-born and bred. It’s also sometimes called
“Attention-Induced Euphoria,” though ASMR is the term that has caught
on. According to Google, the term first showed up in 2011, increased in
search popularity in 2012, and really took off this year.
This is just nomenclature, not science. There is currently no
published research on ASMR, though that may change soon. At Dartmouth
College, Bryson Lochte did an fMRI study on ASMR, which started as his senior honors thesis.
"Even though I’ve never experienced ASMR, I had a gut feeling
that [these videos] were doing something unique in the brain," Lochte
says. "I became more fascinated by ASMR when I started visiting the
forums where posters were reporting euphoric effects, and even
therapeutic effects for symptoms of insomnia and anxiety."
He posted
earlier this year on the ASMR subreddit, calling for volunteers, and
completed the study in May. First, he looked at how ASMR videos affected
"normal people"—18 Dartmouth undergrads. "In the second study we
selected only people we knew could reliably experience and report ASMR,"
he says. "For this we used 10 subjects, most of whom were people from
the subreddit who could commute to Hanover, New Hampshire. In this
second study we asked the participants to bring in videos that they knew
would trigger their ASMR. They then watched the videos in an MRI, while
indicating periods of ASMR with a button press."
Lochte is currently seeking publication, and says he can’t discuss his results until the study is published in a journal.
In 2012, Steven Novella, a neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine wrote a blog post
about ASMR, asking “the most basic question—is it real? In this case I
don’t think there is a definitive answer, but I am inclined to believe
that it is… It’s similar to migraine headaches—we know they exist as a
syndrome primarily because many different people report the same
constellation of symptoms and natural history.” He goes on to speculate
as to what ASMR could be—possibly small seizures, or “just a way of
activating the pleasure response.”
Scientists have studied a
different type of tingle—the chills that go up and down your spine,
often caused by listening to music. Though both sensations can be
triggered by sound, the ASMR subreddit is quick to point out that ASMR
is “NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH MUSIC BASED TINGLES/SHIVERS. Those are
called frisson and can be discussed in /r/frisson.”
David
Huron, a professor at Ohio State University, has studied music-induced
frisson and offered me some “informal impressions” on ASMR after
watching a few videos.
“Physiological arousal (heart rate, respiration, etc.) increases
under a number of circumstances,” he wrote in an email. “One of these is
proximity. We are highly sensitive to close stimuli. When someone
whispers in your ear, that will certainly quicken your heart rate and
grab your attention.”
Even so, “frankly, calling it ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ sounds like a bunch of pseudo-science to me,” he says.
The breathiness of Maria’s voice may also have something to do with
her popularity (she has more than 43 million YouTube views and makes a
small amount of income from her videos). “To the auditory system,
breathiness is a proximity cue, so high breathiness is heard as
symptomatic of intimacy,” Huron says.
There is something about the closeness of a sound. Several people
have told me that the videos work better if you watch them with
headphones in. And many ASMRtists, including Maria, use 3D, or binaural,
microphones, which create a stereo recording that makes the listener
feel like they’re in the same room as the speaker.
“I definitely think it has something to do with proximity,” Maria
says. “When you watch ASMR videos, you’re completely vulnerable, the
viewer is. It’s almost uncomfortable for you to be that close to another
person, but if you feel how much they care about you at that moment, it
just puts you in that state of euphoria.”
Maria says some of her fans use the videos to feel like they have
company—“engineers, or architects, or people that work on the computer
all the time and are lonely.”
"I imagine that the effect may be especially profound for people who
otherwise experience little intimacy in their lives," Huron says.
This weird sort of intimacy is part of the appeal—for many
people, after all, it is close, personal attention that triggers the
tingles, and the videos simulate that as best they can through the
mediator of the Internet.
Understandably, considering the whispering, and the intimacy, and the
term “brain orgasms,” ASMR can seem at first blush like a fetish of
some kind. The ASMR subreddit clarifies: “This is sometimes referred to
as head orgasms, but this is about as sexual as saying eating chocolate
is orgasmic (in that it's not sexual).” And while they may exist, none
of the many videos I’ve watched in the course of reporting this article
have had any sexual content.
Even
so, because she’s a woman who puts her face on the Internet, Maria does
get some unsavory comments sometimes. But she also gets thankful,
heartfelt messages from people who’ve found some comfort in her videos.
She told me she keeps a folder called “Gratitude” on her computer filled
with these messages, that she reads before she makes her videos.
So maybe ASMR is a little weird, and maybe it is a little
lonely—people tend to seem both embarrassed and excited to talk about
it—but this random physical sensation has provided a keystone for an
online community earnestly dedicated to relaxing and feeling good.
“Human communication has been increased to the point that people who
have what they think are unique personal experiences can find each
other, eventually bringing the phenomenon to general awareness, giving
it a name and an Internet footprint,” Novella writes.
“It’s a weird thing to be involved with,” Lee says, “because you
don’t want to go shouting around to your friends and co-workers that you
have ‘brain orgasms,’ but when you find out that others share your
enthusiasm for it, it’s a really cool thing to connect over.”
We open with a close-up of a young woman’s face, shot from below. She gazes downward into the camera, her light brown hair hanging so low as to almost touch the lens. Her eyes are wide with what seems a kind of maternal solicitousness. When she speaks, she does so very quietly and softly, with a mild European accent that is difficult to place. “Hey, sweetie,” she says. “Do you feel a little bit better?” She touches the lens—the viewer’s face, your face—with a gentle finger. “Yeah, you’re having a fever, hun. I just have a little bit of a wet towel. I’ll just put it on your cheeks a little bit, and your forehead, okay? Yeah? OK, sweetie?” She turns away from you for a moment, and when she turns back, she has a blue facecloth in her hand; with this she sets about gently dabbing and wiping your poor, fevered little brow. It is no fun being sick, she tells you. But she wants you to know that you, her sweetheart, are going to be okay. For a further 13 minutes or so, these moistly whispered reassurances continue, until finally the screen goes black, and the whispering fades to silence.
The video I have just described is called “~♥~ Let me take care of you ~♥~,” and it has well over 50,000 views on YouTube. It is what is known as an ASMR role-play. ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which refers to a particular combination of pleasurable physical and psychological affects experienced by a surprisingly large number of people when they hear things like soft whispering, quiet tapping, and gentle crinkling noises. If you search for “ASMR” on YouTube, you will find countless videos like this one. Videos of people, mainly attractive young women, speaking directly to the camera, very softly and very, very slowly, often while pretending to do quite mundane things—giving scalp massages, performing eye examinations, conducting one-on-one napkin folding tutorials. Quite a lot of these are unbelievably long. There is, for instance, a video of a woman pretending to be your dermatologist that goes on for almost half an hour. There’s a video of another woman brushing her hair for an hour and 17 minutes, and there’s a haircut role-play with the near-Tarkovskian running time of 59’58’’ (longer than any actual haircut I’ve ever had). This last one, which is about as tedious a spectacle as you could ever hope to encounter online or off, has had close to a million views.
I’m not one of the lucky people who experience ASMR, so I can only relate indirectly what it’s supposed to feel like. Those who do experience it usually describe it as a pleasant tingling sensation that begins in the scalp and often travels down through to the extremities. It is a sensual phenomenon, but apparently in no way erotic; its effect is one of quietly blissful relaxation rather than any kind of obscure arousal. In fact, lots of people use ASMR videos or sound recordings to help them overcome insomnia, which is why so many of them are so long. The whole point of these things is that they’re profoundly uneventful. In this sense, it’s almost like a form of transcendental meditation; if anything interesting were to actually happen, the whole enterprise would immediately be derailed.
Although the sensation itself has presumably been around for as long as people have been listening to other people whisper or make soft noises, the term ASMR is a very recent one. Its origin as a recognized (although thus far scientifically unverified) phenomenon is usually identified as a 2008 thread on the health discussion forum Steadyhealth.com. The thread, entitled “WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD,” was started by a user named “okaywhatever,” who was curious as to whether anyone else had had the titular weird sensation in the presence of specific stimuli. Other forum users quickly jumped in, saying that they too had experienced an unnamed tingling, which tended to be caused by people whispering or talking very calmly and slowly. A couple of commenters specified that it happened more often in the company of elderly people, who tend to speak more gently. Although the phrase “head orgasm” was briefly proposed, commenters agreed that there was no sexual content to the experience. As a guy called “Tingler” memorably put it, “I got it once really good when I was getting knobbed but I think it was the attention that mattered not the sexual stuff.”
Attention, as Tingler indicates, is a crucial dimension of the ASMR experience. One of the things almost all the role-play videos have in common is that they center around a single person who is speaking to, and attending to, one very important presence: yours. (Non-role-play ASMR content—such as the countless videos of disembodied fingers tapping on things, scratching things and crinkling things—are a different, though somehow no less personal, scenario.) One of the form’s more popular subgenres is the travel-agent role-play, in which a person pretending to be a very soft-spoken travel agent takes you through a range of destination and accommodation options. There are a lot of scalp massages, spa treatments, make-up tutorials, wedding-planner consultations; the whole pampering-industrial complex is gently dramatized here in an array of quietly absurd first-person-perspective YouTube experiences. The active ingredient in all of this—the emotional narcotic that these videos seem formulated to deliver—is a kind of tranquil, womblike intimacy. (It’s worth noting here that, before it even gets a chance to kick in, the calming effect of a lot of these videos is brutally undermined by the viewer’s having to first sit through, say, a Zero Dark Thirty trailer, or an ad for some kind of berry-flavored heartburn medication featuring a triumphantly bellowing Larry the Cable Guy. In that sense, YouTube might not be the ideal media environment for this stuff.)
Although I don’t seem to be able to experience ASMR myself, I find that there is something quite affecting, even poignant, in the idea of people whispering sweet nothings into a webcam, or rubbing their hands up and down a bath towel, so that anonymous strangers might find some unaccountable pleasure or solace in witnessing them do so.
As odd as it is, there is a deeply human quality to this strange convergence of technology, alienation, and intimacy. The first instinctive reaction to ASMR is one of comic bemusement; but if you watch enough it, or if you think about it long enough, it eventually gives way to a kind of baffled reverence. It’s only weird, in other words, because we humans are weird, and because the reasons for our comforts and pleasures are so often obscure to us.
The young woman in the “Let me take care of you” video is known to her 32,000 YouTube channel subscribers as TheWaterwhispers Ilse, but her real name is Ilse Blansert, and she’s from the Netherlands. It felt a little odd to be introducing myself and making preliminary small talk with a woman who, just hours previously, had been mopping my virtual brow and whispering to me that I was going to be all right. (That our conversation was held over Skype, whose video interface approximates the exact view I’d had of her, increased the weirdness.) I’d watched quite a few of her other videos, too—“Hairdresser,” “Dentist Appointment,” “Relaxing Bridal Magazine Flipping”—so it was, more generally, also a little odd to hear her voice at standard conversational pitch. (“Yes, I can speak normally,” she chuckled.)
If you’re like me, you have no idea what’s going on in the above YouTube clip. Six minutes of a pretty blonde woman who goes by GentleWhispering and looks like every kid’s favourite babysitter whispering to the camera in a light Eastern European accent and caressing it occasionally. It’s a little unsettling, almost like finding someone’s video diary and knowing immediately you weren’t supposed to watch it, and the tag “ASMR” doesn’t explain much, least of all why it has 125,000 views and more than 800 likes.
If, on the other hand, you’re one of the people the video was made for – one of those people who experience Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response – you’ll probably find all six minutes incredibly satisfying, the video equivalent of a really nice, mellow kind of drug that leaves no aftertaste. You’ll want to hunt down the hundreds of other ASMR videos floating around the web: pretty young women talking softly and pretending to be travel agents; a pair of hands opening a box of Legos; a 12-minute long pretend-eye exam monologue with no video. That last one is probably the most boring thing I have ever seen on the internet. It has nearly 350,000 views and 850 likes.
ASMR is a tricky feeling to describe, and I can only talk about it secondhand. From what I understand from conversations with ASMRers, it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine. Not everyone gets this feeling, and though some people can get the tingles through sheer force of will, most depend on external “triggers” to set them off. Triggers can include getting a massage or a haircut, or hearing someone talk in a soothing tone of voice (Bob Ross, the “let’s put a happy tree right here” painter from PBS, is a common trigger) or even just watching someone pay extremely close attention to a task, like assembling a model.
It’s not usually sexual – everyone who talked to me about ASMR mentioned that right off the bat – but like sexual turn-ons, different people have different things that set them off: the sound of lips smacking together, a cashier’s fake nails tapping on the register, your friend drawing on your hand with a marker.
Maria, aka GentleWhispering (she didn’t want me to use her last name), has been triggered by everything from accented whispers to being tickled when she was in kindergarten. During a Skype conversation I had with her, she described ASMR as feeling like “bubbles in your head”, and compared it to getting a scalp massage, but the sensation is on the inside. She went on: “It’s like a little explosion, and then just little sparkles and little stars going down [your back]. Depending on the strength of the trigger, it might just go into the top of the spine of the shoulders, but sometimes it goes down to your arms and legs and other parts. Mostly, if you get it in your leg, it’s really exciting!”
Maria is the reigning queen of the ASMR videos, with over 34,000 subscribers to her channel and 12 million views. She mostly speaks directly at the camera in her accented English, giving a Russian language lesson or pretending to be a physical therapist.
She makes a “slight income” from her channel views, but told me she feels guilty about it (“I’m not doing it for money, but I still get it”) and puts most of it back into her videos. She recently bought a 3D microphone, a key accessory for any ASMR video maker; it makes those fake haircuts feel so much more real – put on some headphones and you can hear the scissors snip around your ear while she makes small talk in the other.
Each video takes seven to ten takes for her to get right, and that’s after coming up with an idea, the props she wants to use and a script. And she watches her previous videos to refine her technique – she says she isn’t triggered by her own work, but can feel the moments that would trigger other people.
Maria’s success might also have something to do with the fact that, like most other whisperers, she is young, female and good-looking in a nonthreatening way. Generally speaking, head tingles and sex don’t mix (the “NSFW ASMR” section of Reddit hasn’t caught on), but physical attractiveness can’t hurt. As for the lack of male whisperers, Maria offered a fairly simple explanation: “If a guy is in front of the camera and whispering,” she said, “there aren’t many things he can do that won’t seem creepy.”
Some videos unintentionally cause the tingles – makeup tutorials are an ASMR goldmine, as are vlogs from people with deep, resonant voices. Other videos are more calculated. There’s a whole cottage industry of YouTubers, usually with “whisper” in their screen names, who have created hundreds of videos where they talk softly, or eat Oreos while tapping conspicuously on a mug.
Everyone has probably had the experience of falling into a trance at the drone of a teacher’s voice, or getting some pleasure from stroking his or her hands through a dog’s coarse fur, but ASMR seems to be much stronger than that. It’s hard to be more definite than,“This feeling sure is, um, something, and man people like those videos!” because there have been no official scientific studies on ASMR. When someone created a Wikipedia page for it, it was promptly struck down by sceptical Wiki editors who said the article “lacked scientific evidence”. (Don’t worry, the list of chess openings named after animals is still there.)
Still, enough people report experiencing roughly the same thing in response to roughly the same stimuli, tonnes of people continue to watch the videos, and there are over 22,000 subscribers to the ASMR section of Reddit. As the neuroscientist Steven Novella wrote in March, “It’s similar to migraine headaches – we know they exist as a syndrome primarily because many different people report the same constellation of symptoms and natural history.” ASMR could fit into that same category as homicidal rages, hypnosis and religious fevers that cause people to speak in tongues – exceptional mental states that seem like bullshit unless you experience them, but are unquestionably “real.”
Most likely, people have been experiencing brain tingles throughout history – I’m picturing a filthy nomad warlord closing his eyes in pleasure as his concubine picks lice out of his hair, Catholics in the pews tingling over the measured recitation of Mass in Latin – but mostly kept it to themselves and some odd, private pleasure. Then came the internet and no one kept anything to themselves any more. People started discussing what they couldn’t describe as anything other than a “weird feeling” on health forums and realised they weren’t alone.
Back in 2008, a Yahoo! group called the Society of Sensationalists formed, with a somewhat vague manifesto: “All we have right now are questions and we need answers. We need help, not in the sense that we want to solve or cure this sensation but rather instead to learn what causes this.” People would find their way to these forum discussions by desperate internet searches for “weird head feeling” or “head tingles”, but the discussion remained confined to the forums until 2010, when Andrew MacMuiris started a blog called The Unnamed Feeling to work through the same questions all ASMRers were asking, such as, “What the hell is this?” and “Why does it happen to me?” and “Does it happen to you, too?”
By then, the feeling had a few different names: Attention Induced Head Orgasm, Attention Induced Euphoria, Attention Induced Observant Euphoria... Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response was a phrase coined by Jenn Allen, who founded the site asmr-research.org. “Autonomous” refers to the “individualistic nature of the triggers, and the capacity in many to facilitate or completely create the sensation at will”, Jenn told me in an email. “Sensory” and “response” are fairly obvious, and “meridian”, Jenn said, is a more polite term for “orgasm”. In any case, it certainly sounds official – as Jenn said, “Try explaining why you want money to study ‘goose looping’ or ‘brain orgasms.’”
Researching the causes behind the feeling have proved much more difficult than naming it. Jenn and her associates have found that ASMR is “astonishingly universal”, experienced by people of all ages across every continent. Most people get triggered first as children and carry it around throughout their lives, though some people, including Jenn, discovered the sensation later in life.
But what is it? That’s a trickier question, and one asked all over the ASMR-centric parts of the internet all the time. Some describe the brain tingles as a form of enlightenment. One member of the most popular ASMR Facebook group posited that animals experience ASMR-like sensations when they groom each other. Others have theorised that there’s a link between ASMR and Synesthesia (another little-understood mental phenomenon), while Karissa Ann Burgess, who is in charge of experimental research and data for asmr-research.org, told me she thought that ASMR was caused by “secretions from the pineal gland” in the brain, which is regarded as a “third eye” or even the soul by some people who believe in things like third eyes and souls. I even heard from Shaun Robertson, who doesn’t experience ASMR but was involved in the community for a time, that a few people believed that the condition was “the next stage of human consciousness.”
In the absence of any study with any kind of scientific rigor, you can’t prove or disprove anything. More pragmatically, it’s simply a good feeling. Latasha Bynum, an ASMRer who did a segment on the condition for her public access show in Inland Empire, California, sees ASMR as a kind of all-natural high, a method of relaxation that helped her deal with her insomnia and can help others, like a type of homeopathic medicine. “It’s free, you don’t have to go to the doctor, there are so many benefits,” she told me. “That’s what I really want to get across to everyone. You don’t have to take pills.”
But that old question asked on the Society of Sensationalists group is still unanswered: What causes this? The next step in the research would be to put an ASMRer in something like an fMRI machine, which can measure activity across regions of the brain. But conducting that kind of study would be expensive and tough to organise, considering the ASMR community is spread out all over the world. And even if we knew for sure what caused the tingles, there’s a deeper, simpler question – why does this make some people feel good in the first place?
This is where I have to throw up my hands and say I have no idea. I haven’t found anyone with an answer to that question, and if you know, please tell me. I will say that when I asked Maria where she thought the feeling came from, she had an explanation that made me, for the first time, wish I had ASMR too.
“I think it has to do with childhood,” she said. “Whenever your mother would treat you delicately, or your doctor or teacher would talk to you gently… The caring touch is the biggest trigger.”
![By Ildar Sagdejev (Specious) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0] via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A2003-09-17_Goose_bumps.jpg){kind=link}
