Many young people find safety in the soothing world of ASMR – imagine if we could give them that in the real world | Emma Beddington

ASMR videos can mimic the feeling of physical touch, which a study has found is popular with young consumers. But how many intimate gestures of love, care and connection are they missing out on?

You wouldn’t think a deep dive on slime-squishing and head-scratching videos could be haunting, but a recent study on ASMR content left me haunted and also slightly grossed out.

ASMR, for those not particularly online, is a content genre named after the feeling it provokes in some viewers: autonomous sensory meridian response, a pseudoscientific name for a pleasurable tingling accompanied by a sense of calm. If you’re moderately online, you may know it as “those whispering and tapping videos” – there is lots of that, plus scratching, slime and gentle brushing. But there is much more to it, as I discovered reading a report by innovation agency Revealing Reality, including subgenres that mimic physical touch. You can watch ASMR-ists pretend to brush your hair, groom you for nits or wipe your “face” – the camera – with a spit-moistened finger (that is the gross bit).