The turning point came in 2010, when Jennifer Allen, a cybersecurity worker in New York, gave it a deliberately clinical name. She chose each word to sound respectable, scientific. Autonomous, meaning self-arising. Sensory. Meridian, a peak, without the carnal baggage of “orgasm.” Response. The idea was to make it something a scientist could study without embarrassment. She started a Facebook group, and the label stuck, like chewing gum to the hair.

There are now well over thirteen million ASMR videos on YouTube, the term has ranked among the platform’s most-searched of all time, and its triggers have been used to sell everything from Super Bowl beer to single malt Scotch.

Science came late and cautiously. The first peer-reviewed study appeared only in 2015, when Emma Barratt and Nick Davis of Swansea University surveyed hundreds of enthusiasts of ASMR videos and described the experience as a “flow-like” state, the kind of absorbed, time-dissolving focus athletes and musicians know. Their respondents used it to ease insomnia and stress and reported temporary relief from symptoms of depression and chronic pain.

A survey, though, captures what people say, not what their bodies do. So in 2018, the psychologist Giulia Poerio and colleagues at the University of Sheffield went looking for harder proof and found it. Watching ASMR videos measurably slowed viewers’ heart rates by around three beats per minute while raising skin conductance and lifting positive emotion and feelings of social connection. This showed up only in people who already felt the tingles. For everyone else, the videos did nothing at all. Poerio noted that the physiological calming was in the same league as mindfulness or soothing music.

Then came the brain scanners. Also in 2018, a team including Bryson Lochte and the physiologist Craig Richard slid ASMR responders into an fMRI machine and watched what happened mid-tingle. The brain lit up in regions tied to reward and social bonding, including the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens, the same circuitry that hums during affiliative behavior and is steeped in dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin, the hormone of trust and touch.

That pattern is the basis of what Richard calls the “grooming hypothesis.” His idea is that ASMR trips an ancient neural circuit for being tended by someone we trust. Think of the primate ritual of social grooming, a parent’s murmured fussing over a child, the deep animal safety of being cared for up close. Much of what triggers ASMR (the whisper, the close personal attention, the gentle hands) is precisely the sensory signature of being looked after. The tingle may be the body’s memory of tenderness.

For those it works on, ASMR is useful: a nightly sleep aid, an off-ramp from anxiety, a way to quiet a churning mind. Temperament seems to shape who responds. A 2017 study by Beverley Fredborg and colleagues found that ASMR-sensitive people scored higher than others on openness to experience, an appetite for new sensation, and imagination. They also scored higher on neuroticism, the disposition toward anxiety and emotional intensity. That second trait may be the whole point. A nervous system prone to churning is a nervous system with something to soothe.

The phenomenon has an underside, too. Some of the same people who melt at whispers turn out to be prone to misophonia, a near-rage reaction to sounds like chewing or breathing. The same sensitive wiring that dissolves at one soft noise recoils at another, so that pleasure and fury end up sharing a circuit.

And then there is the large share of humanity that feels absolutely nothing, people who can watch someone tap a hairbrush for twenty minutes and wonder, in complete sincerity, what the fuss is about.

And I have to say, they’re missing out a little bit. Because those tingles feel kind of magical.