You're feeling a bit stressed, so you turn to one of your favorite remedies.

You go to YouTube, and you navigate to one of your favorite channels, and commence watching

a one hour video of someone whispering and brushing the camera lens.

Suddenly, an intensely pleasurable tingling spreads across your scalp and down your neck.

Your stress melts away, and your whole day is turned around.

Congratulations! You've just enjoyed an ASMR experience.

That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

What ASMR will do for you?

Ten years ago, you could have been forgiven for having never heard of ASMR. You might have

been familiar with what it was, even if you didn't know the term for it.

Five years ago, you'd still get a pass, maybe you'd heard the name, maybe you hadn't.

But today, if you haven't seen ASMR go by on your social media, you must have been

living under a rock. And I know that you do have social media because you're listening

to a podcast right now, and that's even more archaic.

ASMR is a pleasant tingling sensation that some people experience when they watch a certain

type of pleasurably relaxing video, and it's triggered a whole cottage industry in the

creation of such videos. So, the many of us who have never experienced this claimed ASMR

sensation are left wondering, is this a real thing?

People describe the experience in varying ways, but the most common is a pleasant tingling

like pins and needles or goose bumps on the scalp, which then may spread to the spine

and neck or down the back. It's nearly always pleasurable, sometimes intensely so.

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