Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photos: Getty Images
Dev Ritchie vividly remembers the first time she experienced ASMR — a feeling of well-being combined with a tingling sensation in the scalp and down the back of the neck, often experienced in response to sound.
She was sitting in a cafe with a friend, who had told Ritchie she wanted to show her something. Ritchie allowed her companion to place a headphone earbud in each of her ears, closed her eyes, and listened to the barbershop-based ASMR video her friend had discovered. Her whole body tingled. Instantly, she was hooked.
She wasn’t alone. According to ASMR University, there are roughly 500,000 ASMR (an abbreviation of autonomous sensory meridian response) channels and 25 million ASMR videos on YouTube alone, and the hashtag #asmr has…