Why ASMR is evil

In 1954, the psychologist James Olds made a few ordinary rats the happiest rodents that had ever lived. He had directly wired an electrode into the rats’ brains, plugging into the septal area, which he believed might have something to do with the experience of pleasure. When he passed a small electric current through the electrode, the rats seemed to enjoy the experience. If he buzzed the rats only when they were in a particular place, they’d keep returning there, as if they were asking politely for him to do it again. So he tried handing over control of the experiment to the rats themselves. Olds gave them a lever: when pushed, it would turn on the electrode. The rats quickly learned how it worked, and they had a fantastic time with it. Some of the rats would giddily push the lever 2,000 times per hour for 24 hours straight. They also lost all interest in food, or sleep, or sex, or any other more mundane ratty pleasures. And not long afterwards, they died, starving and sleep-deprived and in absolute transcendent bliss. Olds was happy with his experiment. The results, he wrote, could ‘very likely be generalised eventually to human beings – with modifications, of course’.

Of course, human beings are not like rats. We demand slightly more out of life. But Olds got his wish: we tried the same thing on ourselves. Later in the 20th century, direct brain stimulation was explored as a way of treating pain without the need for any messy, dangerous drugs. So in 1986, a woman who had been living with chronic pain for more than a decade was fitted with a brain electrode. An article in the magnificently named scientific journal Pain describes what happened next. ‘The patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments. A chronic ulceration developed at the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial… Compulsive use has become associated with frequent attacks of anxiety, depersonalisation, periods of psychogenic polydipsia and virtually complete inactivity.’

Today, this is called ‘wireheading’, and for obvious reasons it’s attracted the attention of science-fiction writers. You can quite easily imagine a future world in which every single human being lives alone in a windowless cell, hooked up to an electrode, maybe along with a food tube or a nutrient drip, experiencing pure unmediated pleasure every second of their lives. With some kind of benevolent AI in charge of everything, the wireheads would be freed from the indignities of work and the disappointments of love; they wouldn’t start any wars or commit any crimes; there probably wouldn’t even be much point teaching them to speak. If the point of life is to be happy, to have as many positive experiences as possible while avoiding all unnecessary suffering, then mass wireheading is the obvious, practical route. We would have finally created a perfect world. 

I think I would, on balance, rather die than live in that world. In fact, I think I would rather be tortured to death; I would spend the next 50 years being very slowly cut into wafer-thin slices from the toes up before I let you hook me up to one of those electrodes. This should not happen to anyone. You could even imagine a nice liberal post-carceral society in which wireheading is reserved only for the most dangerous criminals: people who simply aren’t safe to be around get a copper wire shoved delicately into their brains, so they can live out their days in a state of total rapture, too giddy with happiness ever to pose a threat to anyone else. We could start doing this tomorrow; the technology already exists. But if we did, I would probably feel the need to self-immolate in front of a courthouse. 

The planet of the wireheads will probably not become a reality any time soon. But there are other things out there that aren’t too different, and I felt a touch of that same deep, instinctive horror when I visited Weird Sensation Feels Good, the Design Museum’s exhibition on ASMR.

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The Design Museum describes it as ‘a physical sensation of  euphoria or deep calm, sometimes a tingling in the body’. Some people get it and some people don’t: if you get it, certain sensory triggers will kick off a very pleasant fuzzy sensation, usually starting in the scalp and moving down the body in one big comfortable wave. Like small soft fireworks. Like bubbles sparkling down your spine. 

The specific sensory triggers vary from person to person, but it’s often some kind of soft, gentle noise: whispering, quiet voices, tapping or clicking, the sound of someone slowly chopping vegetables or softly stroking your face. The presence of another person seems important – someone tapping their nails or clicking their tongue might trigger ASMR, but you’re much less likely to get the sensation from rain or a ticking clock. It doesn’t work so well without the emotional element. It’s about feeling safe, and warm, and loved.

 Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf described something that sounds a lot like ASMR in Mrs Dalloway. ‘“K . . . R . . .” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke.’ People have been feeling this sensation since long before we had a word for it; we’ve always found ways to delight in the world and the people within it. Pleasant loving tingles when someone scratches your neck or whispers in your ear. The strange calm of a BBC announcer describing faraway storms on the shipping forecast. In fact, ASMR could be older than humanity: some theorists suggest it might have emerged along with social grooming in our ape ancestors. But in the past decade or so, the whole thing has became very depressing very fast.

 Around 2010, people in Facebook groups and forums started swapping videos that gave them nice tingly feelings. Bob Ross painting a mountain; Bjork taking apart her TV. It didn’t take long before they started trying to induce the effect themselves. Today, dedicated ASMR content occupies a large and growing slice of the internet. These videos are big business; the most popular producers – they call themselves ASMRtists – can pull in seven figures per month. 

 According to the Design Museum, this stuff ‘injects the internet with softness, kindness, and empathy’, and the videos I’ve seen are indeed very soft, kind and empathic. Recording from her bed, a woman in her underwear taps her plastic nails against each other while whispering breathily into a 3D microphone. (A lot of these microphones come with a pair of eerie silicone ears on either side.) ‘I love you,’ she says, and smiles. She nuzzles her lips against one of the plastic ears. ‘You’re so important to me. I love taking care of you.’ She exhales deep into the mic. ‘Does that feel nice?’ In another, the ASMRtist is a man, coming home late at night to find his girlfriend – that’s you, the viewer – already asleep in bed. ‘I know, baby,’ he whispers. ‘I know. You’re a sleepy girl. Go back to sleep, sweetheart, it’s OK.’ He kisses your invisible shoulder. Kind wet mouth noises. ‘You’re safe,’ he mumbles. ‘You don’t have to wake up. Everything’s OK.’ 

Obviously, I’ve picked the creepiest examples. Many of the videos are not like this. Instead of saying she loves you, the girl in the video just whispers that she’s going to make some nice relaxing noises, holds up various household objects to the camera, and then taps her fingers against them. Tap tap tap. Fizz fizz fizz.

This is how you know that things are not going well. There are untold millions of people who spend a good chunk of their free time every day sitting by themselves in a dark room in front of a screen, blissing out to a series of clicking sounds. You listen to someone who does not know your name, and who would not notice if you died tomorrow, pretending to nurture you. This could only exist in a deeply lonely, deeply broken world. It’s miserable to imagine millions of people subsisting on this cheap digital ersatz of intimacy. It’s even more miserable to consider that this cheap digital ersatz of intimacy might be more efficient than the real thing. Human relationships can be ugly and dangerous and they don’t always work, but it turns out that what we’re really looking for in them is a soft continuous clicking sound. Books and films might be enjoyable, but they might also disappoint you: better to strip out all the unnecessary plot and dialogue and attempts to speak to the human experience, and just spend your leisure hours getting yummy tinglies from a kind-faced woman making repetitive mouth noises.

Even outside of ASMR communities, something like this ethos is taking over culture. Grown adults read books for children or watch the same episodes of the same sitcom over and over again – not because these things are particularly good, but because of the way they make you feel. That soft, cosy nostalgic feeling, that sense of comfort in a world that’s so often cruel. Apple TV’s Ted Lasso was described by one critic – who meant this as a compliment – as a ‘warm hug of nice’. Isn’t it mean to criticise the things that bring people pleasure? Shouldn’t we just let people enjoy things?

But ‘let people enjoy things’ is probably what the rats would say if you tried to take away the lever that’s killing them. The woman with the electrode in her brain reported frequent anxiety attacks, which increased the more she self-stimulated. Earlier this year, a study from Northumbria University found that people who self-report as experiencing ASMR are more likely to score highly for trait anxiety and trait neuroticism. The authors suggest that ASMR could be an effective treatment for anxiety attacks. Or maybe it’s the other way round; maybe constantly inducing an entirely artificial sense of wellbeing is not actually particularly good for you. 

The Design Museum’s exhibition doesn’t really address any of this. It starts with the assumption that ASMR is nice, and it’s nice to feel nice senstions. In fact, it’s not really about ASMR at all; instead, Weird Sensation Feels Good is mostly an attempt to get you to experience it. At the centre of the exhibition is a big soft padded cocoon littered with screens and headphones: you wander around, plug yourself in, get cosy, and watch a softly spoken Scandinavian man gently fingering some bed linens. And it was a very nice warm place to be on a rainy London afternoon, but I didn’t feel anything tingling down my spine. No fuzzy bubbles. No deep sense of comfort and calm. Maybe I’d have a different opinion on this stuff if I could experience ASMR myself. But I imagine if you turned me into a wirehead, I’d probably start coming up with reasons why that isn’t so bad either.

Off the main exhibition hall, there’s a smaller room that invites you to have a go at making ASMR-inducing sounds yourself. One of the toys is a microphone under a layer of thick leather; you’re meant to run your fingers softly over the material and listen to the rustling sounds it makes. When I put on the headphones, the stand was suddenly commandeered by two small children. As their mother tried desperately to make them behave, they started furiously banging their tiny fists against the mic while screaming into it at the top of their lungs. There might still be some hope.