Let Me Tell You About My Lifetime of "Braingasms"

Not so much lately, but for about a year I made a habit of crashing a bar-drawing session at a certain drinking/arts establishment here in Baltimore. The thing is called Dr. Sketchy’s and it happens once a month on a Monday. How it goes is that a bunch of drawers and aspiring drawers, paying ten bucks apiece, crowd in with their sketchpads and beer money and sit and perform various drawing exercises centered around a burlesque dancer doing different poses on the stage. I’d say the ratio of solo drawers to groups was about one-to-one, which is fairly unusual for just about any art/music/bar-centric event I can think of. The night is mildly square in a particular burlesque-wave way, and I’d call the scene distinctly anti-gallery — more the sort of person that might get really freaked out in your typical Baltimore cool-kids art establishment. I like that, but I can’t draw for shit and haven’t bothered trying since I was a teenager. I’m into Dr. Sketchy’s for the braingasms.

I was usually the only non-drawer there and, looking back, I probably looked like I was into it for the naked lady kind of stimulation. But not so much. The naked or partially naked part I think is actually corny as hell; instead, I attended to watch the drawers. See, a weird thing happens to be when I watch/“feel” drawing occur within relatively close proximity to my body: my head, back, and neck start to get all tingly, but not any run-of-the-mill tingle, a deep, overwhelmingly pleasurable vibe that manifests in its most identifiable way as a tingle. I don’t generally do drugs because every drug I can think of disagrees with me in some way — panic attacks, throwing up, terror — but if they made a pill that caused this sensation, it would be bigger than Xanax, and I’d buy every one I could get my tongue on.

Turns out this feeling has a name, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, coined by someone on the internet two years ago. It is also apparently a meme, and boasts a large internet-based community of followers. And detractors. But we’ll get to them later. The followers, or experiencers, have in a few short years created a vast catalog of what’s known as “whisperer” videos, which are simply people whispering things, an ASMR trigger that, at the very least, seems to work on me. Not quite as well as feeling someone draw nearby in real life, but in the right circumstances with the right amount of available attention span — the stimulus can’t sit totally in the background — it gives up a mild braingasm, a word that I really hate, but the internet seems to have settled upon for the feeling.

An argument I’ve seen is that this isn’t a unique phenomenon and is simply a physical appreciation of the aesthetic notion of subtlety. That is, we are not exposed very much to very quiet and subtle things in our worlds, so when we’re able to tune into something that is as small as these experiences, we feel something strange because it’s a unique or very unlikely experience. Tuning into smallness is relaxing kind of like tuning into a mantra is relaxing. We’re shutting off a great many other inputs of loud and intrusive things such that we can have our moment with the fine-tip across the room.

I don’t, however, completely buy that explanation. I think there’s something more specific and, possibly, actually scientific happening. The internet loves to discover things that might not really exist, but I’m putting my money on ASMR being an actual phenomena. The internet is also great at discovering real, formerly hidden and quite personal things that many people actually share. Worth noting is that everyone I’ve talked to about this has responded with some variation of I thought I was the only one. I know I’ve tried once or twice to explain ASMR to different people but it never makes much sense or, more likely, it sounds like a fetish. Whenever you really like something weird, it automatically gets put into sexual terms. And I can assure there is nothing sexual about this.

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The Neurologica blog, which seems to be a reasonably critical and skeptical scientific source, offers some amount of hope. Steven Novella writes in a post,

I always start my investigations of such phenomena by asking the most basic question – is it real? In this case, I don't think there is a definitive answer, but I am inclined to believe that it is. There are a number of people who seem to have independently (that is always the key, but it is a recent enough phenomenon that this appears to be true) experienced and described the same syndrome with some fairly specific details. In this way it's similar to migraine headaches – we know they exist as a syndrome primarily because many different people report the same constellation of symptoms and natural history.

Novella points out there right now there is precisely zero real research into this phenomena. There’s a whole lot out there describing it, but hard scientific looks, not so much. Maybe ASMR is a type of seizure: “Seizures can be triggered by auditory stimuli,” he writes. “Perhaps ASMR is a type of seizure. Seizures can sometime be pleasurable, and can be triggered by these sorts of things.” Or maybe it’s just a basic pleasure response, a dopamine kick experienced differently by different brains.

“What we need at this point are functional MRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies that look at what is happening in the brains of people while experiencing ASMR, vs typical controls,” Novella concludes. “Are their brains really different, and in what way? I also wonder if the same or similar experience can be artificially induced in typical (non-ASMR) people.”

If it can be induced artificially, with a pill or powder perhaps, then god help us all. I’d put myself into a vibe coma. In the meantime, I’ll see you at Dr. Sketchy’s not drawing and trying my damnedest to not look creepy.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

• Kissing Technology
• The Ecstasy of Fetishization: An Interview with Guy Maddin
• Psychedelics Make Us Human: An Interview with the Mind-Bending Techno-Ecologic Scholar Richard Doyle