From hear to there
She whispers to you as she takes a pink cloth to your cheeks. The cloth touches the edges of the camera lens, and the mic picks up the soft brushing sound.
“And we’ll get your nose,” she breathes as she gently swipes down the center of the video’s frame. Then Ashlie Holbrook asks you, through the camera, “How’d that feel?”
The “spa role play” YouTube video, in which Holbrook whispers and performs a virtual facial on viewers for more than 40 minutes, has more than 1.3 million views.
It’s popular because it gives some people the tingles.
For some, the whispers and brushing sounds induce a relaxing, tingling feeling that might start at the crown of your head and descend your neck, shoulders and back. That feeling is called autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR. People who experience it say sounds such as whispering, brushing, tapping or crinkling can trigger it.
Holbrook, a Denver-based photographer who goes by WhispersUnicorn on YouTube, is one of many ASMR video artists who create videos designed specifically to give viewers that feeling.
Holbrook started out as a viewer — and remains one.
“I have really bad insomnia,” she said. One night when she was watching a makeup tutorial — they let her “zone out” — she noticed a video next
“That sound of the brushes going tap tap tap, and then he’d say something softly, and it lulled my brain into this relaxed state.” Craig Richard, professor at Shenandoah University
to it, one of an ASMR artist just talking. This led her to search “gentle talking,” which led her to videos of perhaps the biggest ASMR YouTube star, Maria “Gentle Whispering.”
“It was the first time I slept well in a long time,” Holbrook said.
Online comments on her videos and those of other ASMR artists sometimes express shock at the recognition of a long-unexplained feeling, sometimes dating to childhood, or express gratitude for help relieving stress.
“Anecdotes aren’t facts,” said Shenandoah University professor Craig Richard, who is serving as gatherer and scribe for an emerging body of research on the phenomenon. “But when there are thousands and thousands of them, you have to sit up and take notice.”
“The good feeling”
Mainstream media found ASMR a few years ago. Vice had a story in 2012 called “ASMR: The Good Feeling No One Can Explain.” It was featured in an episode of “This American Life” in March 2013. Richard, a professor of biopharmaceutical sciences, first heard about it not long after that, when he was listening to a podcast in his kitchen.
The episode was titled “Why Does ASMR Give People Brain Orgasms?”
He was about to shut it off. “I was thinking, this isn’t real,” he said. Then they brought up the late Bob Ross’ PBS show, “The Joy of Painting.”
Richard turned “Joy of Painting” on when he was a kid after school, to chill out. “That sound of the brushes going tap tap tap, and then he’d say something softly, and it lulled my brain into this relaxed state.”
Inspired, he did a quick Google search.
“I thought, there must be so many scientists out there studying this,” Richard said. “And there was next to nothing.”
He started asmruniversity.com as a place to gather information about research on ASMR, such as an inprogress study correlating personality characteristics and ASMR, and a graduate student’s unpublished MRI scans of brain activity as people experienced ASMR.
The latter is particularly intriguing because no one has nailed down perhaps the biggest question about ASMR: What biological or neurological factors cause the sensation?
The science is in the earliest stages. Until recently, no one had even defined ASMR. Swansea University researchers Nick Davis and Emma Barratt set out to do that with “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): A Flowlike Mental State,” published in PeerJ in March.
“We started our study because we knew almost nothing about ASMR, but realized that no one else did either,” Davis said in an email from Wales. “We wanted to describe some of the core features of ASMR so that other researchers, and people who experience these sensations, could start building on the work.”
The study echoed the video comments: Ninetyeight percent of respondents reported that they use the videos for relaxation; 82 percent use it as a sleep aid; and 70 percent use it to help with stress.
No one knows what percentage of the population experiences ASMR. But Richard is gathering responses for a larger-scale survey on ASMR, and he’s asking everyone, even those who don’t experience it, to take the survey.
Intimate connection
Holbrook, the ASMR artist, has gotten to know some of her followers over the four years she has been making videos. Many are insomniacs like her.
“I have a ton of people emailing me thanking them for getting them off of Ambien,” she said.
She also has viewers who “can’t leave their home,” she said.
“I got a really emotional video from a woman who has cancer, and she’s bedridden,” Holbrook said. “She basically sits around and watches ASMR videos all the time.”
Holbrook said it was inspiring and made her want to try to help more people like that viewer.
The intimate feeling of it — someone whispering into your headphones or pretending to cut your hair — is part of what makes it work. “It feels real, as if this person knows you,” Richard said. “And this somehow sends a message to the viewer’s brain to relax: You’re safe; you’re with someone who cares about you.”
Sometimes the connection spurs real-life relationships. Holbrook’s boyfriend was an early fan. She was cautious about meeting him. “When it’s a fan-based thing, it can definitely cross boundaries.”
Richard said he has known artists to shut down their YouTube channels when the line was crossed. “ASMR is about that intimacy and that connection,” he said, “and there are some viewers who will make too strong of a connection with ASMR artists.
“It doesn’t happen often. ... (but) there have been some artists feeling there’s an unhealthy connection being made.”
And as with many things on the Internet, there are unsavory corners of ASMR, including an adult ASMR forum on Reddit. When Holbrook first started making videos, she was frustrated by having mostly male viewers. Now 65 percent of her viewers are female. “I am super proud of that, because I think it’s easy to get ASMR and porn mixed up, and I try really hard to steer clear of that.”
But the bigger battle is probably being misunderstood. After all, some ASMR videos — such as a 25-minute video of a woman folding cloth napkins — seems absurd. And some people just find them creepy.
Holbrook tries to use some comedy to cut through that. “You’re either really relaxed, or it crosses a line and you’re uncomfortable,” she said. “My way of dealing with that is addressing it upfront — I’m aware that this could be uncomfortable.”