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15 THE RELAXATION AND CALM OF ASMR 125 express surprise upon learning that others do not share their merging of the senses, such is the primacy of their own perceptual experiences.

Synaesthesia has important parallels with ASMR. To the extent that ASMR involves audiovisual stimuli eliciting a tactile sensation and feeling of relaxation, it can be conceptualized as a synthetic experience – specifically, as a form of touch and/or emotion synaesthesia. Sound – touch synaesthetes report different sounds triggering tingling/prickling sensations in different body parts; mirror – touch synaesthetes report feelings of touch/pain/emotions that mirror another person’s experience (e.g. seeing somebody being hit on the head elicits the same sensation in the perceiver); and touch – emotion synaesthetes report certain textures evoking different emotions. Similarly, ASMR triggers (inducers) typically elicit tactile, tingling sensations on the top of the head, as well as associated feelings of calm and relaxation (concurrents). The link between inducers and concurrents in both ASMR and synaesthesia also appears to occur automatically and involuntarily. However, a point of difference between ASMR and synaesthesia is that, in ASMR, a wide range of triggers (e.g. whispering, tapping and close personal attention) elicit the same feeling across many different people, whereas in synaesthesia, different triggers elicit different responses and these responses differ between synaesthetes (e.g. the word ‘family’ may taste like a ham sandwich, whereas the word ‘six’ may taste like vomit). One possibility is that ASMR is a more common but as yet undocumented synaesthetic experience in which there is greater consistency among experiencers with respect to inducers and concurrents.

Aside from the notable parallels between these experiences, the development of the scientific study of synaesthesia and its acceptance into mainstream psychological science may suggest that the science of ASMR is not only possible, but also likely. Unlike the relatively new surge of interest in ASMR, synaesthesia has been documented for over 200 years, with the first scientific reports dating back to 1812. Advances in methods to document the existence of synaesthesia (such as neuroimaging and extensive testing of synaesthetic experiences) have meant that, particularly over the last 30 years, synaesthesia has been recognized as a subjective experience with a distinct physiological and neural basis, one which can facilitate our understanding of normative perception and neural development.