If I'd told you 10 years ago that I'm gonna make a YouTube channel, and on
these videos I'm gonna just whisper, crinkle paper, fold napkins.
You'd be like, "Good luck with that!" If you've never heard of soap cutting, slime
slushing, or hour-long videos of people just whispering, then you probably don't
know about the strangely satisfying world of ASMR. And, who knows, maybe you
are among the very few who could actually feel the so-called brain tingles.
So let's get the acronym out of the way: autonomous sensory meridian
response. ASMR. Before the term was coined in 2010, people referred to this
phenomenon as brain tingles or brain orgasms. So to understand what this is
all about and what ASMR feels like, we met with Dr. Craig Richard. Would you
feel relaxed and calmed if a stranger came up to you with razor-sharp
instruments and kind of carried them and waved them around your head, does that
sound like calming? It's called a hairdresser. And the strange thing is how
many of you feel relaxed when you go to the hairdresser. So all these
understandings of all these triggers, and how they relax you, is this new
understanding of something called autonomous sensory meridian response.
imagine you're getting a massage. How do you feel when you get that massage?
Most people feel deeply relaxed. Well a lot of people when they watch things like ASMR
videos online, they're getting this amazingly deep relaxing feeling, almost
as if they were getting a massage. But the curious thing is no one's touching them.
These videos became so popular that over time, they gave birth to thousands of
ASMR artists or creators. ASMR artists have done a great job of discovering
all these what we've called the ASMR triggers. There are certain triggers that
are common to a lot of people, like whispering, soft tapping, candy tumbling,
scratches on the box, brushes against a microphone, so people usually get tingles
from that. And a person who is not affected by ASMR comes in and goes,
"What is this?" Yeah, you're not gonna get it because you're not a tingle head.
And apparently, tingle heads are not all that common. Even though some of us might find
ASMR videos relaxing, like white noise machines, feeling the actual tingling
euphoria is reserved for just a few. A guess... maybe 20 percent of everyone may have the
capacity to experience ASMR, and that's based upon just talking to people
who do experience ASMR. So we decided to conduct our own little experiment.
We began with soap cutting, which seems to be one of the latest ASMR
trends. The sound is very subtle. The mess is gonna kill me though.
Cutting soap is really hard. I can see if I'm by myself, cutting soap, it's fine, but
I'm just afraid that at some point someone will walk in and see me cutting
soap and then just ask what's wrong with me. It's sort of, it's a really tedious
process cutting soap, right? It's fun but I think I enjoy watching other people do
it because this, the mess makes me a little anxious. It's not putting me into
that trance. Since this particular trigger didn't quite do it for anyone,
we asked Ms Candy to do her thing for us, her specialty being candy tumbling triggers.
It sounds like it's in my head!
I can see it being calming, oddly enough. Sounds like my wife is eating in my ear.
That felt crazy.
I never knew candy could
sound so, like, amazing. So yes, the videos might seem a little odd and a bit silly,
but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that they soothe and even help people.
I know that there's people with insomnia, and anxiety, and PTSD, who are watching
ASMR videos because it calms them down. I'm doing a service for them and helping them.
According to research, 70 percent of participants who experience ASMR watch
these videos to relieve stress. Eighty percent say it helps them to deal with
depression. Forty-two percent recall being relieved from chronic pain, and 82
percent of participants watch ASMR videos to help them sleep. So far we
don't know if it is better than current available
medications and current evidence-based therapies. There's still so much we don't
understand about the human brain and how we're physically and emotionally affected
by everyday stimuli. My big hope, of course, is to see more
research in this.
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