36 | NewScientist | 3 November 2018The phenomenon first came to people’s
attention in 2007, in an online forum thread
titled “weird sensation feels good”. Many
names were suggested, notably “attention-
induced head orgasm” – a misnomer because
the feeling is not as sudden or short-lived as
an orgasm, and is distinct from sexual arousal.
The term that stuck was coined in 2010
by cybersecurity expert Jennifer Allen:
“autonomous sensory meridian response”,
or ASMR. She wanted something that
represented the key elements of the sensation,
but that sounded scientific, so people
wouldn’t be embarrassed to talk about it.
It worked: those who experience the
phenomenon are now a thriving online
community. For instance, the ASMR subreddit
has about 165,000 subscribers. The sensation
has been popularised by pharmacologist Craig
Richard of Shenandoah University in Virginia,
who set up the website ASMR University.
Science then began to catch up. The first
studies of ASMR began to appear in 2014, with
work by Emma Barratt and Nick Davis, both
then at Swansea University, UK. Barratt was a
master’s student interested in synaesthesia:the phenomenon in which people’s senses
merge, so they hear colour or see sound.
“A friend approached me to ask if ASMR
was related to synaesthesia,” says Barratt.
“That was the first time I’d heard of it.”
To start investigating, she and Davis asked
people in online ASMR communities to fill out
a questionnaire. From the 475 responses, they
learned that episodes were pretty consistent:
typically described as “a tingling sensation
which originated towards the back of the scalp
and progressed down the line of the spine and,
in some cases, out towards the shoulders”.
Four triggers were most popular,
each favoured by more than half of
respondents: whispering, personal attention,
slow movements and “crisp sounds”
like tapping fingernails.
Barratt and Davis had established the
basic reality of ASMR. Nevertheless, many
questions remained unanswered – like
what proportion of people experience it.
The only estimate of prevalence comes
from Giulia Poerio at the University of
Sheffield, UK, who surveyed guests at a
public neuroscience event in 2014. Of 91people, 53 had experienced ASMR, 15 hadn’t
and 23 weren’t sure. It is clearly no niche
sensation, and it seems far more common
than synaesthesia, which is only
experienced by 4.4 per cent of us.
The responses also illustrated how
misunderstood the phenomenon is.
“A lot of people who said they had ASMR
either thought everyone had, or they
thought ‘whoa, I thought I was the only
person who experienced it’,” says Poerio.
There is also some information about
who does and doesn’t experience it, thanks
to two studies from 2017. Stephen Smith at
the University of Winnipeg, Canada, and his
colleagues asked 290 people with ASMR and
290 matched people without it to complete a
test that measured the five main personality
traits. People with ASMR had higher scores
on openness-to-experience and neuroticism,
and lower levels of conscientiousness,
extroversion and agreeableness. The second
study partly backed this up: people with ASMR
scored high for openness-to-experience and
low for conscientiousness.
However, it isn’t clear what that means,
says Daniel Bor at the University of
Cambridge. “It’s quite possible that there
is some underlying genetics that makes
people both susceptible to ASMR and
neurotic,” or the high openness-to-experience
could simply reflect the people who try
odd-sounding videos.
It doesn’t help that nobody actually knows
what ASMR is yet, although there are many
ideas. Certainly, it resembles several known
neurological states. Barratt and Davis looked
for a link with synaesthesia, but found no
significant difference in the frequency of
synaesthesia among people who did and
didn’t experience ASMR.
They also compared it to “flow”: the
mental state in which you concentrate fully
on a task and it starts to feel almost automatic.
Their survey revealed that people who
experienced flow more readily also had
more ASMR triggers. But anyone who has
experienced ASMR knows it isn’t flow:
it is fuzzy, almost trance-like.
A more promising comparison is “frisson”.
This sensation is similar to shivering,
complete with goosebumps, but is triggered
by an emotional experience like powerful
music. It is sometimes called “musical chills”.
People often reportedly confuse ASMR and
frisson – but ASMR lacks the shivery, electric
element. A 2016 review argued that ASMR is
relaxing while frisson is arousing. Perhaps
they are two ends of a spectrum.Whatever ASMR is, it has real effects.
In a study published in June, Poerio and her
colleagues monitored people’s heart rate and
skin conductance – a measure of emotional
arousal – while they watched ASMR videos.
Everyone’s heart rates slowed, but the hearts
of those who experience ASMR slowed more.
The team also found that those with ASMR
had increased skin conductance, indicating
greater emotional arousal. “We expected to
find a reduction,” says Poerio. “It might be to
do with the fact ASMR is a complex emotional
experience.”
To really understand the phenomenon,
however, we need to know what is going on
in the brain during ASMR. In 2013, a student
named Bryson Lochte at Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire scanned the brains of
people experiencing ASMR as part of his
thesis. But the study went unpublished for
years while Lochte studied medicine.
In 2016, Smith and his colleagues used
functional MRI to scan the brains of 11 people
who experience ASMR and 11 who don’t, while
they lay down doing nothing in particular.
This activates brain regions called the defaultSlow movements, personal
attention and whispering all
seem to trigger ASMR – and
perhaps not just in us“ A lot of people said ‘woah,
I thought I was the only
one who experienced this’ ”
KAI JABS/PLAINPICTURE