Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR for short, refers to the pleasant tingles some people get from certain sensations, particularly whispers and other soft sounds. The little-understood phenomenon has not attracted much scientific research, but has spawned a sizable community on YouTube, where a search for “ASMR” results in 2.8 million hits. Jordan Pearson takes a look at this subculture and the wildly popular videos, like the one above, that its members produce and consume:
ASMR as an internet phenomenon that took off in 2010, when a Reddit thread asking if anyone else had ever experienced it went viral, and thousands of people realized they weren’t the only ones who’d noticed the pleasant and foreign feeling. An internet subculture of roleplay videos meant to evoke the sensation has since taken off. Tingle-seekers—lots of them—watch videos delivering agreed-upon triggers like soft whispers in order to feel what devotees vaguely describe as “brain orgasms” or pleasant tingles, though there really isn’t any word in the English language to accurately describe the strange sensation.
Many people have started making these videos themselves—gaining hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers along the way—and often with a twist: elaborate roleplaying with a weirdly maternal bent. “The most popular roleplay requests are the ones that involve a lot of what I call ‘personal attention.’ An example of that would be, if you go to the eye doctor, for instance, they’re going to be very close to you,” Ally Maque, an ASMR YouTube personality with over one hundred thousand subscribers told me. …
“I think the ASMR movement, demanding eye contact and prolonged attention, has sort of an undercurrent of optimism and care in the videos themselves that’s really nice. It’s hopeful,” Nitin Ahuja, a doctor and academic who published a recent paper on the topic, told me. “That’s really interesting to see against a backdrop of cynicism about technology wholesale.” Whether the popularity of ASMR videos that express caring and otherwise loving sentiments is a good or a bad thing, broadly speaking, is beside the point and probably a little unfair to the people who enjoy them, Ahuja said.
The Dish 