What the ♥♥♥♥ is ASMR?

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a tingling sensation and a pleasant form of paresthesia, a subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin".

Basically, it's the tingly feeling you get when you hear something really satisfying.

This sensation, referred to within the ASMR community as "the tingles", is a subjective experience that can be triggered by different things. For some, it is the satisfying sound of typing or writing, possibly because it evokes the sense of satisfaction one gets from productivity and a job well done. For others, it is the soft whispering of a gentle voice, substituting the Freudian desire for the gentle whispering and soft touch of a lover. For the truly depraved, it is the crunch of a cold pickle, the crackle of fried chicken, the moist slurping of raw salmon. The real sickos are the ones who get off on all three (forgive me Father, for I have sinned). But truly sickening as this whole concept sounds, I honestly have not met one ASMR detractor who could deny that they, on some visceral level, did enjoy it to some degree once they've actually given it a chance.

Although ASMR has been a thing for well over a decade now—the concept is believed to have originated in 2009 on Facebook by cybersecurity professional Jennifer Allen, who then coined the term a year later—it has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, with a subreddit that has over 200,000 members and several dedicated YouTube channels with subscriber counts well into the millions. A handful of research articles have also popped up the past few years diving into the scientific nature of ASMR.

It's hard to imagine something conceptually strange as "listening to people scratch and tap things for half an hour" to be enjoyable, and I do understand that many people would find it too weird to give it a shot, but I think the lesson we've all learned from the past year was that stranger things have happened, and you might as well throw all reservations to the wind and try out new things that might give you joy, no matter how strange (like the raw salmon video).