YOUTUBE IS A GARDEN OF DIGITALDELIGHTS:
Celebrities invite you into their homes, algorithms serve up
your favorite music, and strangers whisper you to sleep.
If that last one sounds weird, then you probably haven’t
experienced autonomous sensory meridian response, or
ASMR. For some, things like fluttering fingers and soft
voices can trigger “brain tingles,” a pleasurable scalp prick-
ling that cascades soothingly down the body.
Yet other viewers respond negatively to the same cues.
Their revulsion is the result of a psychiatric condition called
misophonia, in which things like chewing and lip smacking
incite a fight-or-flight response. By some estimates, it af-
fects about 20 percent of the population, some so severely
they can’t even work or socialize. (We don’t yet know how
many people experience ASMR.)
These extreme auditory responses are understudied and
poorly understood phenomena. But researching ASMR and
misophonia together could yield new insights into the mech-
anisms that underlie both, says Agnieszka Janik McErlean,
a senior lecturer in psychology at Bath Spa University in
England. Though the two reactions appear to be opposites
(one means “hatred of sound” in Greek, while some de-
scribe the other as a “brain orgasm”), the noises that bring
disgust and inspire bliss aren’t split down any logical line.
The same video of a person crunching sloppily on a pickle
can leave one viewer soothed and another enraged, as can
a clip of someone squishing their fingers into a pile of slime.
If scientists can detangle the pathways connecting audio to
pleasure, the thinking goes, they might be able to bring the
benefits of ASMR videos— which viewers use to relax, fall
asleep, and even cope with anxiety, depression, and post-
traumatic stress disorder— to the tingle-less masses.
McErlean herself had experienced ASMR’s signature shiv-
ers all her life but never thought to study them until 2014.
While researching synesthesia—a brain quirk where differ-
ent senses overlap to create colorful music or strange- tasting
names— one of her subjects described an additional sen-
sation in response to certain sounds: a tingle. McErlean’s
resulting lit search turned up hundreds of YouTube channels
dedicated to stimulating ASMR but not a single scientific pa-
per. “I was blown away,” she says. “It was a total mismatch.”
To understand how this internet craze actually oper-
ated, McErlean began work on a survey of people with and
without the tingle. But she struggled to find a journal will-
ing to publish her research, in part because the anomaly
was easy to trivialize as a digital fad: The very name “au-
tonomous sensory meridian response” was coined by
cybersecurity professional Jennifer Allen, who formedillustrations by
Matteo Burton