This Is Your Brain on ASMR
Craig Richard could not stop watching Bob Ross paint.
It was 1983, and Ross’s television show, The Joy of Painting, had recently premiered on PBS. Richard, then in his early teens, would come home from school in Massachusetts, flip on the TV, and settle in as the painter brought clouds, mountains and “happy little trees” to life on a blank canvas.
Ross famously narrated his creative process in a voice that topped out at a pleasant murmur. “There was something hypnotic about his voice,” Richard recalls. “I would put a pillow down on the floor and end up falling asleep halfway through one of his paintings. I don’t think I ever saw him finish one.”
During viewings, Richard often felt a euphoric, tingly sensation in his head and upper body. “My brain would quickly feel fuzzy, and my whole body would relax,” he says. It reminded him of the inexplicably relaxing pleasure he felt overhearing his younger sister learning to read. “When she would sound out the words and read in that gentle, little-child voice, I would fall asleep.”
It would be 30 years before Richard learned this sensation had a name. He grew up, earned a Ph.D. and became a professor of biopharmaceutical sciences at Shenandoah University in Virginia. Then, around 2013, he was listening to a podcast when the hosts began explaining something called “ASMR.” Richard was bewildered. People who experienced it, Richard recalls them explaining, “tended to really like Bob Ross. It caused them to have head tingles. I was like, Oh!”
Widely enjoyed but little understood, ASMR, short for autonomous sensory meridian
