Inside the Meditation Technique Some Call A “Brain Orgasm”

ASMR meditation has developed a serious following. Here’s what happened when senior editor Lindsay Tucker tried it for a week.

“Ok, I have to give you a shot, but it’ll only hurt for a second,” my little sister says to me as I lie completely still on her bed. We’re 4 and 6 years old, and playing “doctor” is one of our favorite games. In a few months she’ll become obsessed with dentistry, and our mock physicals will become make-believe oral procedures. I’ll open wide in our cotton-candy-blue bathtub (“the dentist’s chair”) and she’ll carefully count my teeth one by one.

Rarely would you find me on the other side of the table, so to speak. Being the administrator of mythological medicine never interested me. Yet being still while my sister “fixed” my feigned ailments relaxed me in a way I could never describe. It was just like the feeling I’d get when we’d sneak into our mom’s bathroom and steal her makeup brushes, taking turns whisking the soft bristles across each other’s faces: gentle tingles running up and down my spine, dancing around my scalp, like butterflies. But no one else I knew ever mentioned butterflies of the brain; no one talked about it on TV. So, I figured it was just me.

Two and a half decades later, I realize the euphoria I felt from getting fake fillings has a cult following to rival Game of Thrones. Dubbed ASMR (short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), it’s a relaxing, highly pleasurable tingling that’s felt on the skin and scalp after certain stimuli. The phenomenon gained a huge online fanbase after someone asked the internet about “head orgasms” back in 2007. All of a sudden, people like me were realizing they weren’t alone in their tingling—and wanted to know more about what made them feel great.