I never knew what the intense physical sensations certain songs gave me were until I heard about the phenomenon called ASMR. Could it be the answer to my musical mystery?
Image by John Gara/Buzzfeed
Ever hear a sound that makes you feel like Super Mario looks when he gets an invincibility star?
A few weeks ago I read an article on Vice called "ASMR, the Good Feeling No One Can Explain." One ASMR — sufferer? experiencer? practitioner? whateverer? — named Maria described it like
feeling like “bubbles in your head,” and compared it to getting a scalp massage, but the sensation is on the inside. She went on: “It’s like a little explosion, and then just little sparkles and little stars going down [your back]. Depending on the strength of the trigger, it might just go into the top of the spine of the shoulders, but sometimes it goes down to your arms and legs, and other parts.”
I think this moment from Velvet Goldmine summed up my reaction to this best:
Source: youtube.com
(The part where Batman jumps up and down pointing and shouting "That is me! That's me, that! That's me!", not the part where Henry VIII says "everybody knows most people are bisexual," although yeah, that too.)
Source: youtube.com
The term ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is used to refer to a self-diagnosed condition in which tingles radiate downward from the top of the head through the neck, spine, and limbs, accompanied by feelings of euphoria, in response to various sensory triggers, from whispered speech to tapping sounds to simply watching a person do something efficiently. Many of the triggers involve somebody playing close attention — to a task, to you, to a task involving you — which gave rise to early stabs at a name for the phenomenon like AIHO (Attention Induced Head Orgasm) or AIE (Attention Induced Euphoria). Discovering its existence told me that no, not everyone experiences what I do, but yes, plenty of people do. And they like to talk about it — as they've done here, here, here, and here, among other places. They have a dot-org and a Reddit community.
What they're describing reminds me an awful lot of the sensation I experienced recently, walking down 7th Avenue in Manhattan to get lunch at Panera Bread, when suddenly the TV on the Radio song I was listening to on my iPod made me feel like my nerves had suddenly been switched to "sparkle":
