Science explains 'Whisper Porn' and it is not what you think
Appealing to senses.
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2015-04-15 18:58 GMT
ASMR, a.k.a. “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a.k.a. whisper porn, is a subject of much fascination but little concrete understanding. According to Metro.co.uk, Whisper porn is the phenomenon of listening to gentle audio recordings which sends the listening onto an almost trance like state of relaxation.
Youtube is full of videos featuring people, usually women, talking in a quiet and soothing manner, however ASMR can take several forms – for some people even the sound of gentle rain or crinkling paper can get them to experience the sensation.
Watch the video here:
This could be the newest genre of porn as some suggest. It usually presents itself in the form of a tingling in the scalp or the back of your neck (which some describe as a pleasurable headache), and can extend throughout the rest of the body. While the sensation isn’t necessarily sexual in nature, some have compared it to an orgasm.
On March 26, Emma L. Barratt and Nick J. Davis, psychologists at Swansea University in the U.K., published the very first scientific paper on ASMR in the open-access journal PeerJ. “The fact that it was so wide-reaching went a long way to convincing me it was something that needed looking into, rather than a niche interest at a corner of the Web,” Barratt was quoted saying.
Emma L. Barratt and Nick J. Davis conducted a study into hundreds of people from the ASMR community, and found that the main ‘triggers’ the videos hit within people were ‘whispering’, ‘personal attention’, ‘crisp sounds’, and ‘deliberate movements’ (such as folding towels or turning the pages of a book slowly). Only five per cent of people within the community say they listen to ASMR for sexual stimulation.
Barrat and Davis also found that several ‘whisper porn’ lovers had synesthesia (the neurological phenomenon commonly associated with seeing numbers or words as colours), leading them to believe that rather than simply being relaxing, ‘ASMR seems to be a very multisensory experience’.