Why ASMR Feels Like a Pleasant Little ‘Brain Massage,’ According to Science
Now and then, before I settle down for some shut-eye, I insert my earbuds and let a YouTube video massage my brain. It isn’t long before my heartbeat and breathing slow down, even as I begin to feel my head, neck, and arms tingle with a thousand tiny points of pleasant electricity. Sometimes it takes only 10 minutes before I’m sinking into a state of sleepy bliss, thanks to the soporific effect of a soft voice, a brushing of cloth, or the tapping of wooden objects with fingernails.
This is my brain on ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). Before I found a community of ASMR channels on YouTube a few years ago, I hadn’t realized that others also found the sound of whispers euphoric. For those who experience ASMR, it is simultaneously relaxing and transporting, usually starting as a wave of tingles at the scalp that moves down to the arms, torso, and even legs. It’s the same pleasure that you may get from having your hair gently brushed, or that a child may get from a mother’s gentle touch.
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Not surprisingly, one of ASMR’s hallmarks is putting people to sleep. Peaceful and comforting sights and sounds—such as whispers, personal attention role plays, or watching someone’s hair being brushed—can trigger these feelings, and so can a foreign accent.
So what is going on in your brain and body, and why do some people truly experience ASMR (you may notice goosebumps), and others just … don’t?
The Rise of ASMR
Over the past decade, ASMR has become a more familiar term.
Worldwide, “ASMR” has been trending over both “chocolate” and “food” searches on YouTube since 2010, according to Google Trends data, and interest is only increasing. The most popular ASMR channel on YouTube, Maria’s GentleWhispering, has at least 2.21 million subscribers, and researchers have published well over 500 journal articles about ASMR.
Once YouTubers started a trend for ASMR videos, they reached the attention of researchers like Giulia Poerio, who studies the intersection between cognition and emotion. Just enjoying this YouTube content doesn’t mean you actually experience true ASMR, says Poerio, a psychology researcher at the University of Sussex, who also teaches at the University of Essex.
“A lot of the work I’ve done has looked at the relationship between imagery, or waking thought and imagination and daydreaming and our emotions,” she tells Popular Mechanics. Poerio personally experiences the sensation, and her deep interest led to her involvement with ASMR University, a collaborative effort to expand research about the potential benefits of what’s been called “brain massage.”
What the Research Reveals
Poerio’s research provided the first direct physiological evidence of the relaxing effects of ASMR. Her team’s study, published in the journal PLOS ONE in 2018, examined the physiology of people experiencing ASMR. They found that people’s emotions during an ASMR experience are reflected in their bodily responses, specifically in heart rate and skin conductance (a measure of the sweating of skin). These measures indicate that the person is having an emotional experience. When people in the study said they experienced ASMR while they watched those YouTube videos, their overall heart rate reduced, but their skin conductance increased. “And that pattern reflects the complexity that people report when they say it’s relaxing, and also arousing at the same time,” says Poerio. Her lab is now trying to replicate those reactions themselves to see whether a specific tingle experience is associated with an increase in skin conductance, similar to what many folks experience as music-induced chills down the spine.
The few fMRI studies done so far during ASMR experiences have shown that certain regions of the reward centers of the brain are activated while viewing an ASMR video, especially when certain triggers, such as personal attention, are involved. Oxytocin and dopamine appear to be involved, according to one study, whose participants watched ASMR videos during a brain scan and reported their sensations. One of the study authors, Craig Richard, is also founder of the ASMR University website and author of Brain Tingles, a how-to guide to stimulate ASMR, relaxation, and sleep.
A primary source of the relaxing sensation is sound. However, not everyone in a group is likely to find a particular sound equally relaxing, and there’s no magic frequency or other sound property that triggers ASMR, Richard tells Popular Mechanics in an email. Instead, it’s about the individual. “This could be a simple biological reason, such as some people have different gene sequences that make them more sensitive to oxytocin or other brain chemicals that are involved in their responses to sounds. Alternatively, this could be due to a life experience, cultural influences, or even a current mindset that affects their ability to be relaxed by a specific sound at that moment.” So far, we don’t know why the same sounds elicit different responses among people, but there are bound to be multiple causes, researchers say.
Hate ASMR? Blame Misophonia
Take the disgust some people feel at hearing someone chewing. In the YouTube community, it’s easy to find videos that include eating sounds to trigger ASMR. (Personally, I’m one of the people who can’t stand it, so I stay away from those videos). It could be that people who are sensitive to the positive affects of ASMR are also sensitive enough in many cases to misophonia, a negative emotional response to some sounds, typically chewing, slurping, and snoring. Misophonia causes a person to feel intense irritation, even anger, and a desire to escape when they hear such sounds. Essentially, it’s the opposite of ASMR. Yet Poerio and other researchers have found that those likely to experience misophonia are also likely to experience ASMR, and vice versa.
A study Poerio co-authored in March 2022 studied 648 people in Japan and revealed that about 20 percent of them experienced ASMR. Researchers also saw a notable overlap of 52 percent between participants who had ASMR sensations and also had synesthesia (experiencing a sensory perception through stimulation of an unrelated sense). And the study found that synesthesia is up to four times as common among ASMR responders (22 percent) as among non-responders (5 percent). This relationship is yet to be further explored, says Peoria. The study was published on the preprint site ResearchSquare.
Mirror Touch Sensations
Poerio just released a study in August 2022 looking at the prevalence of related mirror touch sensations. “So mirror touch is essentially, when, if you see somebody being touched, it feels like you’re being touched too,” she explains. “And what we find is that people with ASMR are more likely to experience mirror touch sensations, and there also is a higher prevalence of mirror touch synesthesia in an ASMR population.” A person with synesthesia in this case would see someone being patted on the head and feel the sensation of their own head being patted.
“Often people forget that touch itself is a very strong ASMR trigger. One working hypothesis we have is that what [videos showing touch or having certain types of sounds] might be doing is allowing people to experience tactile stimulation in the absence of actual touch,” Poerio says. “So sound feels like touch to people, and that touch is soothing.” Decades of research show that since infancy, specific forms of of touch are healthy for emotional health, like hugging or having your hair played with, she adds.
It’s still unknown why some people experience ASMR and others don’t. And why do some people get more benefit from that than others, such as stress relief? There might be developmental origins associated with how you were soothed as a child by caregivers, Poerio thinks.
One other odd feature of ASMR is that videos can create more tingles than similar, real-life experiences. “Curiously, some people experience stronger ASMR from videos, and others report experiencing stronger ASMR from real-life moments,” Richard says.
While ASMR is still mysterious, one thing is clear: researchers have no shortage of questions to explore in their quest to explain its workings in the human mind and body.
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