Many young people find safety in the soothing world of ASMR – imagine if we could give them that in the real world
You wouldn't think a deep dive on slime-squishing and head-scratching videos could be haunting, but a recent study on ASMR content left me haunted and also slightly grossed out.
ASMR, for those not particularly online, is a content genre named after the feeling it provokes in some viewers: autonomous sensory meridian response, a pseudoscientific name for a pleasurable tingling accompanied by a sense of calm. If you're moderately online, you may know it as 'those whispering and tapping videos' – there is lots of that, plus scratching, slime and gentle brushing. But there is much more to it, as I discovered reading a report by innovation agency Revealing Reality, including subgenres that mimic physical touch. You can watch ASMR-ists pretend to brush your hair, groom you for nits or wipe your 'face' – the camera – with a spit-moistened finger (that is the gross bit).
Many of ASMR's young consumers say they watch to soothe feelings of being overwhelmed by the outside world. A subset described other feelings the videos gave them: solace, safety and the sensations they associate with being loved. One fan explained that her mum used to give her nightly head massages; now, watching head-scratching videos helped her sleep. 'People like to feel taken care of,' a creator theorised.
We all get calm and comfort from different things (crisps and chickens here), but we're creatures who need physical connection; we're mammals, primates. It feels a bit melancholy, young people using YouTube to conjure the feeling of intimate gestures of love and care and connection, seeking what the report calls a 'digital response to fundamental human needs … that previously would have been met through embodied experiences'.
I found myself wondering what 'embodied experiences' I would like to recreate. The first that came to mind related to our dog, who died 18 months ago: rubbing the floppy silk of his ears between finger and thumb; cupping my palm over the dome of his anxious little skull with thumb and middle finger; stroking the bald patches behind his ears; scratching his back on the spot just in front of his rear legs that made him reflexively paw the air. Looking at pictures of him conjured other sense memories: the roughness of his pink and black paw pads; running my hands along the swooping curve of his hairless belly; fluffing the rosette on his chest where the hair whorled in different directions with a fingertip. I can still remember how that felt, just.
Then there are bigger, headier, physical sensations around my sons' birth and infancy; you're never more animal than at those times. I remember the astonishing slither of a heel along my lower ribs from the inside; how the sudden, comic poke of a sharp elbow felt. I would give a lot to feel, just momentarily, that singular joy of being inhabited. I'd love to relive my now-huge younger son curled against my shoulder after a feed, my palm spanning his back, massaging an air bubble through his still-shrimpy newborn body.
But all that stuff is gone: baths and hair washes; feeling hot wriggly bodies slip into stillness as they fell asleep against me. It's not just the kids: there is the way an intensely anticipated first kiss felt both inevitable and absolutely surprising. Never again will I feel the bulletproof exhilaration of galloping across moorland, pony sweat and peat in my nostrils, to a soundtrack of curlews and lapwings – too old, too scared. My mum was small but her love felt gigantic. When I try to conjure what it felt like to hold my cheek against her very soft one, I can almost get there, but not quite.
That is sad, but it is OK. Physical sensations are powerful and precious because they are finite; no ASMR alchemy or immersive VR experience could come close to recreating them, and I would far rather have the memory than an ersatz version anyway. We live and feel those moments, then we honour them and keep them alive by missing how they felt. But we also keep holding, touching the people and creatures we love, and that means we are always laying down new sense memories of connection. Maybe someone should be whispering that?
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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