Sometimes I have out-of-body body moments and starkly realise that I’ve just been entranced by some sorcerer on YouTube swishing saliva about in her mouth, repeating the word ‘stipple’ about a million times and making weird butterfly motions with her fingers. Please help me!
Is anyone else grossly engrossed by this phenomenon?
Some of my favourite videos include:
Why do we like ASMR so much?
‘Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response’ or as The Guardian so eloquently puts it, these ‘head orgasms’ are a result of our senses being stimulated, specifically by an external source known as a ‘trigger’ which creates a tingling-like sensation normally starting at the scalp and evolving down the spine.
The human reaction to the stimuli varies from person to person, with some people not even reacting to the triggers at all (poor people). Science is yet to quite understand why this characteristic has came to be, what purpose does it serve?
Whether we know this answer scientifically, I myself find it useful in combating stress, others have reported the beneficial effects ASMR also, including lowering levels of depression and increasing relaxation. So surely it serves some purpose, and morseo, a positive one.
Some popular triggers include:
- Mouth smacking
- Whispering
- Nail Tapping
- Crinkling
Why doesn’t ASMR work on everyone?
It may be that different people have different thresholds to biological stimuli, as The List states. Going further it may infact BE on a physiological scale. With the focus being on how endorphins are produced in each of our bodies. It may be that people who produce endorphins more easily or have sensitive endorphin receptors will react to an ASMR stimulus more easily than someone with a lower or slower endorphin rate of release.
Who knows, maybe it’s just one of these quirks of nature? Let’s see what science says in the coming years. As something tells me ASMR is staying around long enough to have a few lab tests ran on it!
**I don’t own any copyright to the videos**
The Neon Squid 