Popular Science - USA (2019-10)

80 WINTER 2019 • POPSCI.COM

2001 2007 2009

GIBI ASMR

“This genre is about a lot more

than hushed voices and tingles. I

get a sense of calm and euphoria

from cosplay personal-attention

videos, in which people dress up

like characters and look, speak,

and gesture directly into the cam-

era. Others enjoy the Korean

genre mukbang, where hosts eat

huge amounts of food near a mic.

That doesn’t seem like traditional

ASMR to me, but it makes a lot of

people happy. It’s exciting to see

scientists begin to recognize what

I’ve always believed: that ASMR is

not just sounds, but also the visual

experience of hands and other

gentle, coordinated movements.”

OLIVIA KISSPER ASMR

“I happened across the phenome-

non in 2013 while studying

psychology, with a focus on the spir-

itual and sublime. I was shocked

that no one was talking about it

scientifically and decided to create

my own channel to learn more. Now

I make a wide variety of videos, but

I’m trying to get away from main-

stream content. I speak to some of

my viewers on the phone—I some-

times even provide one-on-one

coaching for them—and I get the

sense that ASMR is a great short-

term therapy for anxiety or

insomnia. But most videos don’t

address any core psychological

issues. I try to offer more long-term

help by combining ASMR, hypnosis,

and spiritual inquiry to make the

experience more therapeutic.”

YouTube hosts millions of

videos meant to incite ASMR—

and they’re not just careless

whispers. Two creators share

their motivations and methods.

Timeline of a Trend

ASMRtistry

an enthusiast Facebook page in 2010 (“meridian” replaces

the potentially stigmatizing sexual connotation of orgasm

with a more abstract reference to some developmental peak,

while the rest of the phrase describes tingles in vaguely clin-

ical terms). It wasn’t until 2015 that a pair of psychologists

from Swansea University in Wales released the first paper on

ASMR; McErlean’s data followed in 2017. Both studies de-

fined the condition and identified common triggers, which

include whispering, finger tapping, and hair brushing. To

McErlean’s surprise, she also found that some people with

ASMR reported extreme aversion to certain sounds.

That led her to misophonia, which audiologists first

described in 2001. Experts still aren’t sure what causes it or

how best to treat suffering patients, but even the small body

of existing research provided McErlean with more reference

material than her dive into ASMR. To start, she tapped the

Misophonia Questionnaire, a scale developed by doctors at

the University of South Florida in 2014. It assesses a patient’s

symptoms and their severity, as well as the specific re-

sponses sounds elicit. The higher the score, the more likely

a person will need professional treatment, like cognitive be-

havioral therapy, to cope. In a small 2018 study, McErlean

found that 36 percent of subjects with self-reported ASMR

had misophonia. Some of the randomly selected con-

trol subjects turned out to experience ASMR as well, and

70.8 percent of them fit the diagnostic criteria for misopho-

nia. For those, McErlean suspects, discomfort triggered by

some of the genre’s most popular noises could keep them

from seeking out sounds that induce pleasant shivers.

Small-scale studies are providing crucial clues about

the shared roots of the conditions. Both sensations set off

a reaction in the body’s autonomic nervous system, which

controls involuntary actions like breathing. When people

with misophonia hear certain noises, their heart rates rise;

when folks with ASMR get triggered, their tickers slow. Both

groups also experience increased sweat on their fingertips,

which psychologists consider a measure of nervous system

arousal. In the throes of misophonia, this is a sign of discom-

fort; mid-ASMR twinge, it’s indicative of rapture.

People with intense reactions to sound—whether

Steadyhealth.com user

okaywhatever writes

a post titled “Weird

sensation feels good.”

That’s the first known

reference to what we

now call ASMR.

Audiologists Margaret

and Pawel Jastreboff

define “misophonia,” or

hatred of sound. They

argue that the condition

is a problem of audio

perception, like tinnitus.

WhisperingLife creates

the first intentionally

tingle-stimulating vids

on YouTube. By the end

of 2018, the site will

host more than 13 mil-

lion clips of this genre.

A brief history of

ASMR research