Relax, you may have ASMR
Videos sparking pleasurable, hypnotic-like sensations are now getting millions of views on YouTube
Does watching somebody brush their hair give you shivers down your spine? If so, you may have ASMR — Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response — a pleasant tingling sensation triggered by certain sights or sounds.
When I was young, going to the eye doctor was a sensory wonderland. With dim lights and a doctor speaking near my ears in slow, calm tones (“Right? Or left? Better? Or worse?”), I would feel a staticky buzzing start in my scalp then crest down my spine like a moving aura.
I thought people could tell what I was feeling and kept it to myself for 25 years.
That was until 2012 when a friend told me she used ASMR videos to fall asleep. On YouTube, I found hundreds of people describing the same feeling and making videos to induce it. I no longer had to wait for my annual trip to the eye doctor to experience tingles.
Ilse Blansert’s experience was remarkably similar. She got the feeling as a child growing up in the Netherlands, but never really talked about it until 2012, when she discovered videos of people whispering, role-playing cranial nerve exams and completing mundane tasks like folding laundry.
“I was so happy! No — so happy is an understatement. I was over the moon.”
Thrilled that she was no longer alone, Blansert started making her own videos and experimenting with triggers — different stimuli that would set off her ASMR. “One of my first triggers was Bob Ross, the painter,” she recalls. “The brushes and paint on the canvas, combined with his voice? It was great.”
Ross, with his giant afro, was the soft-spoken host of The Joy of Painting. The TV series teaching people to paint landscapes populated with “happy little trees and clouds” was a staple on PBS in the ’80s. You might say Ross was the first ASMRtist, as those who produce ASMR videos like to be called.
Blansert met her fiancé through ASMR and moved to Toronto to be with him. Her two YouTube channels have more than 27 million views, enough to put her squarely among the top five ASMR video producers.
Blansert is an ASMR ambassador when media organizations come calling. And they do. In the last few years, ASMR has exploded in popularity.
Toronto filmmaker Lindsay Ragone saw that growth while gathering footage for Braingasm, her documentary about ASMR.
She and Blansert met over Skype and in 2013, she flew to Europe to film Blansert, who had so many subscribers that she was invited to film in Google’s London studios. Ragone and 17 fellow ASMRtists tagged along. It was the community’s first real-life gathering. Little by little, the feeling of being alone fell away.
But stigma still exists. For instance, some in the community bristled at the name Braingasm. They worried they’d be labelled as fetishists.
“There’s nothing more telling that there is something taboo about this than being scared of saying the word braingasm,” Ragone says. “It’s weird, because there’s a sexual repression for something that’s not at all sexual.”
The reaction of the medical and scientific communities may also enforce that taboo. To date, just two medical papers referencing ASMR have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
I contacted at least 10 doctors and three researchers before Dr. Luis Fornazzari agreed to speak with me. The behavioural neurologist with the department of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto told me he saw similar resistance in his research of the sensory condition known as synesthesia.
Synesthetes may associate certain numbers and letters with colours, see the colour of music or view dates on a threedimensional plane. Fornazzari saw patients struggle to categorize themselves, while doctors were puzzled by a phenomenon that didn’t require a cure.
“With something as complex as synesthesia or ASMR, they are lost.”
Right now, there are only theories about what exactly ASMR is. Some have suggested it could be tiny, pleasurable seizures. Others wonder if dopamine, sero- tonin or oxytocin play a part. Blansert believes it’s the deepest state of relaxation a person can reach and likens it to hypnosis.
“There are obviously sensorial issues involved,” Fornazzari says. “We need to study it clinically, get enough responses to develop a phenotype.”
There are signs that science is becoming more receptive. A few overseas studies are still in the early stages and an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College did his senior honours thesis on ASMR by scanning subjects in an MRI machine. The results haven’t been published yet.
“If it’s not a disease, it can often be labelled as fringe and put on the back burner,” says Fornazzari, adding it can be difficult to get research funding as universities and hospitals are constrained by budgets.
However, the possibility exists that ASMR could benefit people suffering from anxiety, insomnia, depression and PTSD. Fornazzari says ASMR could very well come to be used in conjunction with traditional therapy or medication.
“I don’t see any problem with trying it out,” he says, adding that doctors prescribe many alternative therapies, such as meditation, dance or hypnosis. “But without data, nobody is going to believe you. If we can prove that ASMR is good, great! Let’s do it. Let’s explore.”