The official contemporary history of ASMR began on 19 October 2007 on a discussion forum for health-related subjects at a website called Steady Health.[30] A 21-year-old registered user with the handle "okaywhatever" submitted a post describing having experienced a specific sensation since childhood, comparable to that stimulated by tracing fingers along the skin, yet often triggered by seemingly random and unrelated non-haptic events, such as "watching a puppet show" or "being read a story".[31]
Replies to this post indicated that a significant number of other people had experienced the sensation described by "okaywhatever", also in response to witnessing mundane events. These interchanges precipitated the formation of a number of web-based locations intended to facilitate further discussion and analysis of the phenomenon, for which there were plentiful anecdotal accounts,[26][18] yet no consensus-agreed name nor any scientific data or explanation.[27]
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Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway contains a passage describing something that may be comparable to ASMR.
Clemens J. Setz suggests that a passage from the novel Mrs Dalloway authored by Virginia Woolf and published in 1925, describes something distinctly comparable.[32][33] In the passage from Mrs Dalloway cited by Setz, a nursemaid speaks to the man who is her patient "deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound".[34]
According to Setz, this citation generally alludes to the effectiveness of the human voice and soft or whispered vocal sounds specifically as a trigger of ASMR for many of those who experience it, as demonstrated by comments posted to YouTube videos that depict someone speaking softly or whispering, typically directly to the camera.[26]
Animal grooming has been interpreted as a form of bonding.
There are no known sources for any origins for ASMR, since it has yet to be identified as having biological correlations. Even so, a significant majority of descriptions of ASMR by those who experience it compare the sensation to that precipitated by receipt of tender physical touch, providing examples such as having their hair cut or combed. This has led to the conjecture that ASMR might be related to the act of grooming.[35]
For example, David Huron, Professor in the School of Music at Ohio State University, states:
[The "ASMR effect" is] clearly strongly related to the perception of non-threat and altruistic attention [and has a] strong similarity to physical grooming in primates [who] derive enormous pleasure (bordering on euphoria) when being groomed by a grooming partner...not to get clean, but rather to bond with each other.[24]
Imaging subjects' brains with fMRI as they reported experiencing ASMR tingles suggests support for this hypothesis, because brain areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex (associated with social behaviors including grooming) and the secondary somatosensory cortex (associated with the sensation of touch) were activated more strongly during tingling periods than control periods.[36]
