A Strange Mental Resonance

Ease on your Sennheisers as I sidle up to this binaural microphone: it’s time to talk about ASMR. ASMR is a silly medicalish retronym that some clever pseudoscientist coined to diagnose — and keep in mind that ASMR is nothing if not hand-wavey — that tingly feeling in the back of your head. The word tingles coincides often with ASMR.

I personally tend to think of the “tingles” as a relaxed curiosity, a state of being safely invested in the actions of another—at least that’s my personal experience of ASMR. Many people claim to have experienced it while watching Bob Ross be Bob Ross. Honestly, it’s not worth defining; you’ll get a much better feel for it by watching videos on YouTube.

Are you back? Are you sufficiently relaxed? Did a kind man or (most likely) woman offer to examine your cranial nerve, whatever that is? During the course of your exam, as this doctor whispered over your chart, did you experience a welling calm flood up from your brainstem? If yes: hey great, welcome to a strange corner of the Internet. If no: eh, no big deal, and welcome to a strange corner of the Internet.

ASMR is interesting for tons of different reasons (possible depression treatment? sleep aid? heretofore undiscovered physiological response?), but we’re Web People, and Web People in watching hours of sweet nothings may notice a curious cynical thing: ASMR doesn’t lend itself well to the only reason anyone is really on YouTube, making money. At most there’s a 15-second ad in front of an hour-long video. Product placement doesn’t work when success is your audience falling asleep. Yet ASMR has grown, year by quiet year. The most popular videos have millions of views. The (sigh) content creators guest on each others’ channels, experiment with low-key 3D video, and release the world’s least effective ringtones. All for something that, scientifically speaking, hasn’t been proven to exist.

We build platforms for other human beings to communicate in ways we envision will be better, where better is defined in our conference rooms as faster, or more reliable, or more closely aligned to a business model. But every platform is also, unbeknownst to us, a massive distributed detector of human phenomena. A sub rosa SETI, tuned to tingles. First came YouTube. Then a man at the zoo. Then content, as expected. And then someone mentions that they like hearing people whisper, and others comment: me too. WOIP, a sursurrous, manufactured reciprocity. It’s a brand new feeling, says the machine, an autonomous sensory meridian response. And I’m still listening. So what will we discover next?