Have you ever felt a tingling sensation sweep across your head and neck as someone brushes your hair or speaks softly to you? If so, you probably fall among theBecause it is pleasurable and relaxing, some people watch YouTube videos that induce the sensation through sounds and visuals. But despite its popularity online, researchers still do not know how it works. Now, a team claims to have
Both he and one of his co-authors, psychologist C. Clark Cao from Lingnan University in Hong Kong, say that they themselves got tingles when they listened to the artificial clips. “That was pretty exciting,” says Cao. “While there seems to be a few universal triggers for ASMR, many people are triggered by things that seem to be unique to them, things like metallic sounds or certain types of voice,” he says. “The approach [in this preprint] is really interesting, as it looks for universal features in the sounds that ‘work’ for people.”
Ryota Shimokura, an acoustics researcher at Osaka University in Japan, subscribes to this idea and does not think spectral features alone can control ASMR. The most important factor, he reckons, is whether the sound can produce a realistic, immersive experience., he found that human-generated sounds, like hair-brushing or page-flipping, induce ASMR compared to nature sounds.