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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2946 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Great example.

And some people are paying for recordings where they can hear a woman's tongue unstick from her hard palate.

I don't need to know these things!

I've experienced "low-grade euphoria" observing people doing some task, although rarely. I've experienced frisson from music or speech. I've never seen how ASMR as a media format ties these experiences together or delivers them. The term was apparently coined on a forum in 2007, so it seems more like a cultural memeplex ("brainrot") fueling an industry with paraphilia and fetish branches.

On second thought the Primitive Technology guy could be ASMR adjacent content I've enjoyed.

I've experienced frisson from music or speech. I've never seen how ASMR as a media format ties these experiences together or delivers them.

Neither have I. I know that I can reliably experience frisson by attentively listening to Stairway to Heaven, right around the moment where Page's guitar solo peaks and Plant starts to sing "and as we wind on down the road" is when it hits me. I can even trigger it by thinking about listening to the song. But this has nothing in common with what most people consider ASMR triggers.

One hypothesis is that I have high sensitivity to this kind of stimuli. There are people that are into tickling and find it erotic. Many people find body kisses or balls licking erotic. I find these activities so ticklish that I automatically violently recoil and my wife stopped trying, fearing for the integrity of her nose. But one or two times everything was just right and I could understand how a gentle kiss on the ribcage, just shy of triggering the tickling reflex, can be pleasurable. Just like the right amount of heat in a dish or the right combination of a hot sauna and an ice-cold shower or popping a stubborn, but not too stubborn pimple can be.

So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.

So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.

I have similar issues with ticklishness like you described, but I also enjoy ASMR and enjoy blanketing my food with whatever spice I'm into at the moment, so this is probably specific to the stimulus. Never been to /r/popping or know what it's about, but based on context, that sounds disgusting & I'd rather stay away.

I'd say ASMR is as distinctively clear a feeling as frisson, but yeah, definitely two different things caused by practically opposite stimuli. I feel like I've experienced it my whole life, from being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class, to sometimes when getting haircuts, to even being stuck on the phone with some customer service person taking too long to work through something (clacking away on a keyboard while verbally stalling). So I pretty much knew instantly what youtubers were going for when I started seeing the videos in like ~2012, even with the ridiculous 'asmr' term someone came up with.

My experience was more of assuming everyone else was lying about not understanding it, out of some embarrassment that it was too weird or was somehow sexual. But it does really seem like many people don't get the 'back of the head tingles' feeling. Not sure if that goes for frisson too - are there many people out there who don't get 'chills' from some epic swelling music moment?

Then the asmr videos are trying to inorganically bottle it as a more 'pure cut' for people chasing the dragon, like epic movie trailers have tried to get a few frisson moments down to a science.

I also definitely experience it, although most ASMR videos don't do it for me. I usually encounter it when vaguely sleepy, relaxed, and then a pleasant stimulus happens, like a soft speaking voice (the "being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class" story seems about right) or a gentle, repetitive noise.

If I do encounter it from an ASMR video, whispering or crinkling does it more than anything else.

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