Braingasm, a.k.a Auto-Sensory Meridian Response: Is It Real?

When future archaeologists sift through the relics of our civilization 10,000 years now, probably the most puzzling thing about us will be our obsession with kitty videos.

Certain sights, sounds, and smells, and to a lesser extent, tastes and smells, cause us to go ooh and ah and feel tingly all over. Now known as brain orgasm, braingasm, brain shivers, or auto-sensory Meridian response, this experience has captured the attention of consumers of Internet videos and is beginning to generate scientific inquiries.

What Is Auto-Sensory Meridian Response?

For lack of a better definition, this neurological condition is a state of feeling nice. Typically, it is triggered by exposure to non-threatening, repetitive visual stimuli that could be described with another term, optimal heterophily. The sensory input that triggers this feel-good state is familiar enough to be comfortable, but just different enough to be unexpected. 

What Are Some Examples of Auto-Sensory Meridian Response?

The triggers for the tinglies are different in different people. For some people, often people who own cats, an inexplicable spasm of feeling good occurs after viewing a kitty video, taken of someone else's cat. Other people are lulled into a state of bliss by watching travel documentaries, cooking shows, or the Home Shopping Network, as long as no actual travel, cooking, or purchases are involved. 

In one popular YouTube video posted by GentleWhispering (and linked below), an interior decorator introducing herself as Maria spends 20 minutes speaking in a sweet, gentle, soft voice explaining how to fold towels. On the date this article was written, this video about folding towels had received 358,195 hits, more than videos on global warming, radiation from Fukushima, the evils of Monsanto, or mind control by the Bilderbergs.

Of course, mass experiences of auto-sensory Meridian response really aren't all that new. In the USA, in the 1990's, tens of millions of people became weekly devotees of a television "show about nothing," called Seinfeld. Millions more are fans of a PBS series on how to do landscape painting by late television host Bob Ross, watching, rewatching, and rewatching again all of 400 episodes of The Joy of Painting. (The writer of this article is one of the millions hooked on the painting show.)

What Does "Auto-Sensory" Mean? And What's a Meridian?

The auto-sensory Meridian response, sometimes abbreviated ASMR, is "auto-sensory" in that the strength of the pleasure response can't be explained in terms of observable stimulation. There is no immediately obvious, objective reason watching the same episode of a landscape painting course should cause repeated experience of bliss.

The ASMR occurs on a Meridian in the sense that the "tinglies" aren't felt all over the body so much as they tend to be felt up and down the body. And the experience is a response in that it does not occur in response, usually, to a purely imaginary experience, although it is possible to get oohs and ahs and tingles in response to a remembered experience.

Is It Normal to Enjoy Auto-Sensory Meridian Response?

A writer for the Huffington Post commented that it is easy to explain one's state of pleasure to someone unexpectedly walking in when one is watching porn than when one is watching a kitty video. But there's no doubt that the experience of auto-sensory Meridian response is normal. Actually, its the site members of Steady Health who established this for the world.

Steady Health Forum Members First to Identify Auto-Sensory Meridian Response

Steady Health members initially described the experience as a "head orgasm," but that was a little too sexual actually to describe the experience (the sensation of niceness usually starts in the head, as in the area of the body above the shoulders in both sexes) and only coincidentally has anything to do with sex. A Steady Health forum member named Tingler explained the situation perfectly when he noted, "“I got it once really good when I was getting knobbed but I think it was the attention that mattered not the sexual stuff.”

Auto-Sensory Meridican Response Similar to Falling in Love, Only without a Lover

And that is the key. The oohing, ahing, and tingling we get from auto-sensory Meridian response come about from the sense of another person being there just for us or an event happening just for us. Auto-sensory Meridian response is almost just being polite. Someone in our world pays attention to us, just to us, so we pay attention to them, just to them, and it feels very, very good.

The experience is a lot like falling in love, only without all the baggage. The kitty in the kitty video, for instance, never forces us to fill its bowl or change its litter box. It's just there for us to love. The beautiful woman teaching us how to fold towels doesn't expect a nice dinner or a movie, and we don't even actually have to fold any towels. But how does the phenomenon really work?

Real Effects on the Human Body

Scientists don't know why one experience triggers auto-sensory Meridian response in one person and a different experience triggers auto-sensory Meridian response in another, but studies of a therapeutic method known as tapping hint that the auto-sensory Meridian response has real effects on the human body.

In tapping, which could be considered a really boring kind of auto-sensory Meridian response, pain is relieved, but "stress" hormones, the hormones that are activated during sex and other pleasurable experiences, are unaffected. It's as if the experience of tapping turns off pain without turning off "good stress," keeping us energized while bad feelings go away.

Maybe something similar happens when we watch reruns of painting shows or we rewatch kitty videos. Science doesn't really know. But Steady Health forum members know that auto-sensory Meridian response is real and it puts a smile on lots of faces.