Does this make your brain tingle? The rapid rise of ASMR

I once had a flatmate called Tom, who behaved very oddly when our cleaner came round. On mornings when she was due he’d become strangely excited, like a man waiting for a date, though Madge (70) seemed an unlikely target. I would leave the flat so that Madge could get on with it, but Tom would insist on staying. He’d settle himself into an armchair, close his eyes and sit there, still as a toad, as she hoovered and dusted around him. Eventually I asked him about it, and he confessed. Listening to Madge, he said, ‘makes my brain feel nice’. As he explained it, the sounds of cleaning, sweeping and busying about sent delicious shivers running across his scalp. ‘It’s blissful — like a tingling feeling. But it’s not at all sexy,’ he was keen to stress.

I said: ‘Don’t fret, Tom. That all sounds… normal.’ I had no idea then just how very normal Tom was.

This was in 2007 and, as it happens, that very year a group of people gathered in an online chatroom to discuss that very feeling. They didn’t all depend on cleaning noises: the sounds that set it off were many and varied. For some it was a whispering voice, for others a tapping sound or the crinkling of paper, though everyone agreed that a feeling of being given personal attention and cared for helped. One of the chatters concocted a plausible-sounding bit of jargon: autonomous sensory meridian response, ASMR for short, and that was what stuck. And that’s what has, more than a decade later, become an internet phenomenon.