Ok this isn't really big news, but it's a good read for people who are already familiar with ASMR as well as people who don't know what the hell it's about, or even people who have it and are now finding out what it is!
I remember there were a couple of ASMR threads in GD, but none of them had a good explanation about it, which left many confused I believe. So this article would be a good explanation about what people have found so far.
[quote][media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc88Zaye89g[/media]
If you’re like me, you have no idea what’s going on with the above YouTube clip. Six minutes of a pretty blond woman who goes by GentleWhispering and looks like every kid’s favorite babysitter whispering to the camera in a light Eastern European accent, caressing it occasionally, staring into it intimately, almost flirtatiously. It’s a little unsettling, almost like finding someone’s video diary and knowing immediately you weren’t supposed to watch it, and the tag “ASMR” doesn’t explain much, least of all why it has 125,000 views and more than 800 likes. If, on the other hand, you’re one of the people the video was made for—one of those people who experience Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—you’ll probably find all six minutes incredibly satisfying, the video equivalent of a really nice, mellow kind of drug that leaves no aftertaste. You’ll want to watch GentleWhispering’s other videos, and hunt around for the hundreds of other ASMR videos floating around the internet: pretty young women talking softly and pretending to be travel agents; a pair of hands stroking and crinkling plastic bags in almost disturbingly sensual ways; another pair of hands opening a box of Legos; a 12-minute long pretend-eye exam monologue with no video. That last one is probably the most boring thing I have ever seen on the internet. It has nearly 350,000 views and 850 likes.
ASMR is a tricky feeling to describe, and I can only talk about it secondhand. From what I understand from conversations with ASMRers, it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine. It’s a shortcut to a blissed-out meditative state that allows you to watch long videos that for someone who doesn’t have ASMR are mind-meltingly dull. Not everyone gets this feeling, and though some people can get the tingles through sheer force of will, most depend on external “triggers” to set them off. Triggers can include getting a massage or a haircut or a manicure, or hearing someone talk in a soothing tone of voice (Bob Ross, the “let’s put a happy tree right here” painter from PBS, is a common trigger), or even just watching someone pay extremely close attention to a task, like assembling a model. It’s not usually sexual—everyone who talked to me about ASMR mentioned that right off the bat—but like sexual turn-ons, different people have different things that set them off: the sound of lips smacking together, a cashier’s fake nails tapping on the register, your friend drawing on your hand with a marker.
Maria, aka GentleWhispering (she didn’t want me to use her last name), has been triggered by everything from accented whispers to scratching grainy surfaces to being tickled when she was in kindergarten. During a Skype conversation I had with her, she described ASMR as feeling like “bubbles in your head,” and compared it to getting a scalp massage, but the sensation is on the inside. She went on: “It’s like a little explosion, and then just little sparkles and little stars going down [your back]. Depending on the strength of the trigger, it might just go into the top of the spine of the shoulders, but sometimes it goes down to your arms and legs, and other parts. Mostly, if you get it in your leg, it’s really exciting!”
Maria is the reigning queen of the ASMR videos, with over 34,000 subscribers to her channel and 12 million views. She mostly speaks directly at the camera in her accented English, giving a Russian language lesson or pretending to be a physical therapist or just talking about her life or answering questions sent to her by her fans. Sometimes she crinkles bags or folds napkins or shows off some souvenirs she bought in the Dominican Republic.
She makes a “slight income” from her channel views, but told me she feels guilty about it (“I’m not doing it for money, but I still get it”) and puts most of it back into her videos. She recently bought a 3D microphone, a key accessory for any ASMR video maker; it makes those fake haircuts feel so much more real—put on some headphones and you can hear the scissors snip around your ear while she makes small talk in the other.
You could credit her popularity to her personable, bubbly on-camera nature, or to her prolificacy (she has over 120 videos), but she also works much harder than it looks like she does. Each video takes seven to ten takes for her to get right, and that’s after coming up with an idea, the props she wants to use, and a script. And she watches her previous videos to refine her technique—she says she isn’t triggered by her own work, but can feel the moments that would trigger other people.
Maria’s success might also have something to do with the fact that, like most other whisperers, she is young, female, and good-looking in a nonthreatening way. Generally speaking, head tingles and sex don’t mix (the “NSFW ASMR” section of Reddit hasn’t caught on), but physical attractiveness can’t hurt. As for the lack of male whisperers, Maria offered a fairly simple explanation: “If a guy is in front of the camera and whispering,” she said, “there aren’t many things he can do that won’t seem creepy.”
Whisper videos are just one branch of a YouTube subculture of ASMRers making, discovering, and promoting videos for their triggering properties. Some videos unintentionally cause the tingles—makeup tutorials are an ASMR goldmine, as are vlogs from people with deep, resonant voices. Other videos are more calculated. There’s a whole cottage industry of YouTubers, usually with “whisper” in their screennames, who have created hundreds of videos where they talk softly, eat Oreos while tapping conspicuously on a mug, or pretend to be travel agents, doctors, or hair stylists—however many fake haircut videos you think there are on YouTube, there are more than that, and people love them.
Everyone has probably had the experience of falling into a trance at the drone of a teacher’s voice, or getting some pleasure from stroking his or her hands through a dog’s coarse fur, but ASMR seems to be much stronger than that. It’s hard to be more definite than, “This feeling sure is, um, something, and man people like those videos!” because there have been no official scientific studies on ASMR. There’s little information on it online apart from a tightly woven network of websites; when someone created a Wikipedia page for it, it was promptly struck down by skeptical Wiki editors who said the article “lacked scientific evidence.” (Don’t worry, the list of chess openings named after animals is still there.)
Still, enough people report experiencing roughly the same thing in response to roughly the same stimuli—and enough people are watching odd videos in an attempt to trigger themselves—that it would take an especially prejudiced skeptic to say that ASMR was purely a figment of a few thousand people’s imaginations (there are over 22,000 subscribers to the ASMR section of Reddit). As the neuroscientist Steven Novella wrote in March, “It’s similar to migraine headaches—we know they exist as a syndrome primarily because many different people report the same constellation of symptoms and natural history.” ASMR could fit into that same category as homicidal rages, hypnosis, and religious fevers that cause people to speak in tongues—exceptional mental states that seem like bullshit unless you experience them, but are unquestionably “real.”
There’s no record of ASMR existing until a couple years ago, but it’s not as if this feeling suddenly appeared and swept across the globe. Most likely, people have been experiencing brain tingles throughout history—I’m picturing a filthy nomad warlord closing his eyes in pleasure as his concubine picks lice out of his hair, Catholics in the pews tingling over the measured recitation of Mass in Latin—but mostly kept it to themselves and some odd, private pleasure. Then came the internet and no one kept anything to themselves any more. People started discussing what they couldn’t describe as anything other than a “weird feeling” on health forums, and realized they weren’t alone.
Back in 2008, a Yahoo! group called the Society of Sensationalists formed, with a somewhat vague manifesto: “All we have right now are questions and we need answers. We need help, not in the sense that we want to solve or cure this sensation but rather instead to learn what causes this.” People would find their way to these forum discussions by desperate internet searches for “weird head feeling” or “head tingles,” but the discussion remained confined to the forums until 2010, when Andrew MacMuiris started a blog called The Unnamed Feeling to work through the same questions all ASMRers were asking, such as, “What the hell is this?” and “Why does it happen to me?” and “Does it happen to you, too?”
By then, the feeling had a few different names, among them Attention Induced Head Orgasm, and Attention Induced Euphoria, which Andrew adopted before expanding it to Attention Induced Observant Euphoria. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response was a phrase coined by Jenn Allen, who founded the site asmr-research.org. “Autonomous” refers to the “individualistic nature of the triggers, and the capacity in many to facilitate or completely create the sensation at will,” Jenn told me in an email. “Sensory” and “response” are fairly obvious, and “meridian,” Jenn said, is a more polite term for “orgasm.” In any case, it certainly sounds official—as Jenn said, “Try explaining why you want money to study ‘goose looping’ or ‘brain orgasms.’”
Researching the causes behind the feeling have proved much more difficult than naming it. Jenn and her associates (Andrew is involved in asmr-research.org as well) have found that ASMR is “astonishingly universal,” experienced by people of all ages across every continent. Most people get triggered first as children and carry it around throughout their lives, though some people, including Jenn, discovered the sensation later in life.
But what is it? That’s a trickier question, and one asked all over the ASMR-centric parts of the internet all the time. Some hypotheses that get tossed around have a New Age-y flavor to them; some describe the brain tingles as a form of enlightenment. One member of the most popular ASMR Facebook group posted a “Universal Theory of ASMR” that described Yoga, chanting, and ASMR as tapping into the vagus nervous system (which keeps track of the organs), and also posited that animals experience ASMR-like sensations when they groom each other. Others have theorized that there’s a link between ASMR and Synesthesia (another little-understood mental phenomenon), while Karissa Ann Burgess, who is in charge of experimental research and data for asmr-research.org, told me she thought that ASMR was caused by “secretions from the pineal gland” in the brain, which is regarded as a “third eye” or even the soul by some people who believe in things like third eyes and souls. I even heard from Shaun Robertson, who doesn’t experience ASMR but was involved in the community for a time, that a few people believed that the condition was “the next stage of human consciousness.”
Well, my gut says probably not the next stage of human consciousness one. But in the absence of any study with any kind of scientific rigor, you can’t prove or disprove anything. ASRM is thetans, it’s Jesus, it’s a bunch of benign tumors, it’s somehow related to that impulse inside of us that accounts for religious experiences and hypnosis.
More pragmatically, it’s simply a good feeling. Latasha Bynum, an ASMRer who did a segment on the condition for her public access show in Inland Empire, California, sees ASMR as a kind of all-natural high, a method of relaxation that helped her deal with her insomnia and can help others, like a type of homeopathic medicine. “It’s free, you don’t have to go to the doctor, there are so many benefits,” she told me. “That’s what I really want to get across to everyone. You don’t have to take pills.”
Like makers of drugs improving their potency, the techniques for triggering ASMR are getting more and more precise and elaborate—at this point, fake haircuts with 3D mics are old news—but that old question asked on the Society of Sensationalists group is still unanswered: What causes this? The next step in the research would be to put an ASMRer in something like an fMRI machine, which can measure activity across regions of the brain. That would explain what was happening on a chemical level, at least, but conducting that kind of study would be expensive and tough to organize, considering the ASMR community is spread out all over the world and trying to study this in their free time. And even if we knew for sure that the tingles were an increase in dopamine, or serotonin, or some secretion produced by the pineal gland, there’s a deeper, simpler question—why does this make some people feel good in the first place?
This is where I have to throw up my hands and say I have no idea. I haven’t found anyone with an answer to that question, and if you know, please tell me. I will say that when I asked Maria where she thought the feeling came from, she had an explanation that made me, for the first time, wish I had ASMR too.
“I think it has to do with childhood,” she said. “Whenever your mother would treat you delicately, or your doctor or teacher would talk to you gently… The caring touch is the biggest trigger.”[/quote]
for the links and stuff (aka source)
[url]http://www.vice.com/read/asmr-the-good-feeling-no-one-can-explain[/url]
also
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/jv9pu.jpg[/IMG]
what the fuck
I just felt creeped out when she started stoking the camera lens and said I "looked nice."
[editline]1:21PM[/editline]
Yeah this video just makes me feel [b]really[/b] uncomfortable after a while...
soccer moms will put an end to this
I came across ASMR when I first started exploring with states-of-mind and improving the quality of my experience.
I had an epiphany from reading a particular passage in a book that put me into a days-look full body euphoria which pretty much felt like orgasm continuously..
A year and a bit on, I have to say you can pretty much summon the same effects as ASMR within yourself from anything. Am I saying you can control neurochemicals and make yourself incredibly happy or any number of other things on demand? Pretty much, yes.
Do you really want to? I can't advise you on that.
It's a beautiful and rare thing to experience such euphoria, certainly, and prior to beginning my exploration, I had no clue that such things existed.
[QUOTE=Rellow;37022296]I just felt creeped out when she started stoking the camera lens and said I "looked nice."
[editline]1:21PM[/editline]
Yeah this video just makes me feel [b]really[/b] uncomfortable after a while...[/QUOTE]
This video is kinda funky. Bob Ross gets me every time though. More of a sleep aid than a painting instructor.
[QUOTE=SCopE5000;37022351]I came across ASMR when I first started exploring with states-of-mind and improving the quality of my experience.
I had an epiphany from reading a particular passage in a book that put me into a days-look full body euphoria which pretty much felt like orgasm continuously..
A year and a bit on, I have to say you can pretty much summon the same effects as ASMR within yourself from anything. Am I saying you can control neurochemicals and make yourself incredibly happy or any number of other things on demand? Pretty much, yes.
Do you really want to? I can't advise you on that.
It's a beautiful and rare thing to experience such euphoria, certainly, and prior to beginning my exploration, I had no clue that such things existed.[/QUOTE]
Sorry?
[QUOTE=RobbL;37022394]Sorry?[/QUOTE]
[Quote=OP]it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine. It’s a shortcut to a blissed-out meditative state[/quote]
[Quote=OP]Not everyone gets this feeling, and though some people can get the tingles through sheer force of will, most depend on external “triggers” to set them off[/quote]
You can do this yourself, through the 'sheer force of will' she explained, except you kinda need to know what it is, in order to 'seek' it.
And it's not a kinda 'roll outta bed' happiness either. It's not even a 'yay my football team won' kinda happiness. It's like a 'I'm on fucking drugs right now' happiness except without the drugs.
[QUOTE=RobbL;37022394]Sorry?[/QUOTE]
Satire
[QUOTE=Don Knotts;37022370]This video is kinda funky. Bob Ross gets me every time though. More of a sleep aid than a painting instructor.[/QUOTE]
Bob Ross' voice is so soothing.
Not news.
[highlight](User was banned for this post ("Why reply" - Craptasket))[/highlight]
I've had this plenty of times. Sometimes get it when talking to a really good teacher, or someone knowledgeable in their area of expertise.
For anyone who's interested:
[url]http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/[/url]
[QUOTE=Occlusion;37022474]I've had this plenty of times. Sometimes get it when talking to a really good teacher, or someone knowledgeable in their area of expertise.
For anyone who's interested:
[url]http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/[/url][/QUOTE]
every vid uses a shitty mic
I've had this for as long as I can remember, but it's weird to think that at the time of some of the earlier memories of this, for example when someone was reading a book to me in kindergarten, this didn't even officially 'exist' yet.
[QUOTE=MrEndangered;37022449]Satire[/QUOTE]
Oh right, I didn't watch or read anything in the OP so I thought SCop was just high or something
Some of my favourites.
Bear in mind it's not about the CONTENT of the video, but rather the individual noises. I'm a bloke; I couldn't care less what a 'foundationer' is or how many mascaras you use. But the voices and the sound of gentle clinks and bumps is amazing if you're in the right mood.
[video=youtube;1x1mj-EhsMk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x1mj-EhsMk[/video]
[video=youtube;C7vU125Zhpg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7vU125Zhpg[/video]
[video=youtube;Jb4h3xZHfX4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4h3xZHfX4[/video]
[video=youtube;I8ttb4Bs-ZQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8ttb4Bs-ZQ[/video]
[video=youtube;fVlOYXHaFyA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVlOYXHaFyA[/video]
[B]And this one in particular[/B]
[video=youtube;KlBJlqdODBY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlBJlqdODBY[/video]
Huh I get that but never knew it had a name.
Hey, I'm sure that after watching all those videos I'd be an expert on Make-up. Why not use this technique for kids in schools to teach about math and stuff?
No, seriously!
[QUOTE=D3TBS;37022697]Hey, I'm sure that after watching all those videos I'd be an expert on Make-up. Why not use this technique for kids in schools to teach about math and stuff?
No, seriously![/QUOTE]
I've had teachers who put me into ASMR states and let me tell YOU something;
best experience ever.
Worst learning experience ever haha
[QUOTE=SCopE5000;37022351]I came across ASMR when I first started exploring with states-of-mind and improving the quality of my experience.
I had an epiphany from reading a particular passage in a book that put me into a days-look full body euphoria which pretty much felt like orgasm continuously..
A year and a bit on, I have to say you can pretty much summon the same effects as ASMR within yourself from anything. Am I saying you can control neurochemicals and make yourself incredibly happy or any number of other things on demand? Pretty much, yes.
Do you really want to? I can't advise you on that.
It's a beautiful and rare thing to experience such euphoria, certainly, and prior to beginning my exploration, I had no clue that such things existed.[/QUOTE]
i doubt that's asmr but nice that you can do that
[editline]31st July 2012[/editline]
please don't start a cult around this
i watch these videos when i cant sleep sometimes
good shit
I can sometimes trigger this when I am working at my checkstand. Mundane things like customers grabbing bags of stuff out of there cart and gently placing it on the belt can really create some intense ASMR.
It's such a strange thing. But I love it when it happens, time literally flies by because I am in such a state of trance created by the world around me. No drug can achieve this like what my brain does naturally. I'm pretty sure I created one of the first threads here on Facepunch about this too, it was about how I got off to people unboxing shit.
I don't believe I've ever felt ASMR. these videos just make me feel oddly violated, as if someone keeps prodding me between the ribs.
Now I think I do find some video's of women talking to the camera enjoyable, to certain extent.
The video in OP is weird as fuck.
EDIT: after watching some other video's in this thread, I noticed they where also weird as fuck, who the fuck makes this shit.
2ND EDIT: What the fuck, I am so fucking intrigued by the fact these "normal" girls make these video, but for what audience? Is it for dudes who have never had a girlfriend and enjoy someone talking directly to them or whatever.
I have never felt this and have no idea what it is after reading about it, watching videos that are supposed to summon it, and reading other people's experiences. I guess it is something that is not meant for me to feel. You can't really explain a feeling to a person that has never felt it I guess. Most of these videos are just creepy to me.
[QUOTE=Cone;37022938]I don't believe I've ever felt ASMR. these videos just make me feel oddly violated, as if someone keeps prodding me between the ribs.[/QUOTE]
Exactly.
[URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqg20bJ6L7M&feature=player_embedded"]This video[/URL] works better for me (found in the ASMR thread on GD).
It's pretty cool. I love the feeling, but mine is triggered more by being taught things or helped with things in a gentle way than it is by being comlimented like in the OP's video.
[QUOTE=RobbL;37022561]Oh right, I didn't watch or read anything in the OP so I thought SCop was just high or something[/QUOTE]
High as a kite whenever I choose, but without the weed.
[QUOTE=Killer monkey;37022667]Huh I get that but never knew it had a name.[/QUOTE]
Feels great! Trigger it, then take it as far as it can fucking go, until you can't make it go any further, then see what happens..
I honestly think this is more or less the next step for humans, becoming much more in-touch with the sensations we get under the surface when we're happy, sad, hurt, fearful - the things that we usually go through life without being consciously aware of - that occasionally manifest as stuff like back pain, or appear in a cut-down form when we're strongly nervous before going on stage or something big.
If you can remember a time back in childhood when you were heartbroken, or any other really strong emotion, that's what I'm talking about.. a really strong dull sensation in the diaphragm, or extreme joy, an 'upwards' feeling at heart level.. It seems to fade as we get older - ASMR seems to be a sort of 'reminder' that such guttural sensations exist and can be harnessed without drugs - and I really hope it prompts people to start exploring it themselves.
I think we're probably evolving to become more sensitive to these sensations as a 'wake up' call - as a race, we've invested to much time in making 'love' about roses and marriage and less about the joy of just being with someone, without even needing words - and making 'happiness' about owning more and more possessions, etc.
Here's some interesting resources on the subject for anyone who might be interested.
I think [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Buddhist_Enlightenment]Zen Buddhist's[/url] were the first through the door, albeit with a great deal of effort (or not as the case may be).
I'd name [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville]Herman Melville[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato]Plato[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman]Walt Whitman[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U._G._Krishnamurti]Krishnamurti[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagwan_Shree_Rajneesh]Osho[/url] and [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein]Albert Einstein[/url] to be the 'early pioneers'.
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckhart_Tolle]Eckhart Tolle[/url], [url=http://www.wisefoolpress.com/]Jed McKenna[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesar_Millan]Cesar Millan[/url], [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yFC2nJqVog]Michael Brown[/url], [url=http://www.mooji.org/]Mooji[/url], etc are the early-adopters and pioneers of the 21st century, each essentially describing the exact same thing with different words, and the same thing that everyone else has written about it.
Now ASMR has cropped up, with people experiencing unexplainable sensations that they haven't felt before that they are triggering at will, it's fucking excellent. Usually there's a lot of sitting doing nothing (meditation) and deliberating to be done before becoming aware of unconscious sensations, but now people are experiencing it naturally through the normal course of human experience.
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;37022748]i doubt that's asmr but nice that you can do that
[editline]31st July 2012[/editline]
please don't start a cult around this[/QUOTE]
Creating a 'cult' around it is pretty much impossible.. Just the fact that the same thing doesn't trigger the same effect in everyone disallows one from forming. People can only really figure it out for themselves, which is the great thing about it, so whilst a community can form and discussion flourish, there's nothing to worship, no guides to follow, nothing to 'believe' in, nothing to really 'do'.
I've listened to ASMR/whisper vids for a long time, it's great for relaxing.
Also, for the guys having an identity crisis looking at makeup ASMR, fear not:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlKhbh1yirE[/media]
Are we talking about that sensation you get when you get excited and it's like goosebumps all over your body and it makes you feel energized? Or am I way off? I'm trying to understand what this is.
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