Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)

854 Words4 Pages
There has been a growing number of YouTubers subscribing to channels where the viewer can watch and listen to someone whispering, flipping pages in a book, pretending to give the viewer a shoulder rub, and more, in order to trigger a process called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR. The experience is said to be a tinglly sensation that begins from the back of the head traveling down along the spine, and for some individuals it continues to travel into the shoulders. A Swansea University psychology lecturer, Nick Davis, and a Swansea University psychology graduate student, Emma Barratt surveyed 500 individuals who have experienced ASMR. They asked the surveyees what the reason they enduce ASMR, and what sensations they felt as…show more content…
That, socially, we lack the intimacy aspect we experience from relationships (friendships, family, and real loving types of relationships). Intimacy is not limited to couples who are in love. There is a quality of non sexual intimacy that we gain, and that is very healthy for us, from all our close relationships whether we are aware of it or not. Let us recall the survey done by Nick Davis and Emma Barratt. Personal attention was found to be a trigger for ASMR for 69% of the individuals surveyed. So, speculating on these results, some believe that people have now found a way through the internet to experience a false sense of connectedness with someone who is pretending to care for them; it's a way to recreate the intimacy of relationships that has almost been lost within daily…show more content…
As a viewer, your attention is heightened (and lengthened). You experience an illusion of direct eye contact, a sense of proximity, a deep concern with intangible details, and a pantomime of tenderness. A neurophysical remedy to our fractured sense of real-life engagement with each other. Unfortunately, even with it's official scientific sounding name, there is no science backing that Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response exists. There isn't any known percentile of the collective whole who are able to experience it. Just as it is unknown if it truly occurs, it is unknown why it occurs, and what parts of the psycholigical and physical areas are involved and affected. Even so, there is plenty of places on the web creating countless mechanisms that will trigger the process, and following this plenty is a growing audience. About 90,000 people subscribe to the dedicated ASMR subforum on Reddit, and the ASMR Requests channel on YouTube (where users can experience custom ASMR wish fulfillment) has nearly 200,000 subscribers. There’s even an International ASMR Day on April
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  • Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response

    827 Words  | 4 Pages

    is to trigger a process called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR. For individuals who have experienced ASMR, they describe it to be a tinglly sensation that begins from the back of the head traveling down along the spine, and for some individuals, it continues to travel into the shoulders. The ASMR community say that there must be some type of physiological process occurring because it is visual and audital stimuli that can “trigger” the ASMR response. So, what gets these "triggers"

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