Awe

As children get older, they shift to tearing up when feeling small and lacking agency vis-à-vis forms of authority. This is true, for example, in being scolded by a teacher, pressured by a coach who takes her job too seriously, reprimanded by a parent having a bad day, or teased inappropriately by a popular peer. At this stage, our tears arrive when we feel small in relation to the vast forces of local culture—peers, parents, teachers, coaches, and other adults. The embrace we seek is in the acceptance of others within our culture, in particular our peers.

In adulthood, the vast things that elicit our tears become more symbolic and metaphorical, as is true of nearly every human experience. We tear up during cultural rituals and ceremonies; while appreciating certain kinds of music, movements in dance, films, and scenes in theater; when celebrating sports championships; and even when hearing about abstract ideas like justice, equality, rights, or freedom in speeches or portrayals of historical events. And we tear up when seeing meaningful places where we found awe with those who have departed. Tears of awe signal an awareness of vast things that unite us with others.

Chills

“My childhood was one of extreme awe.” That is how Claire Tolan responds when I ask about her early experiences of awe. Her phrase makes me wonder, as do her fierce eyes and mussed-up hair.

Claire grew up in Ohio and found awe outside. She began writing at age twelve, producing volumes of poems and prose throughout her teens. She found early poetic sublimity in the words of William Carlos Williams, which led her to study poetry as a college student and then attain a PhD in information science.

Upon graduating, Claire moved to Berlin to work on an app that she described to me, in a café in that city, as “Airbnb for refugees.” Her landing in the new city, though, was rough. She felt anxious and tense. The unsettling presence of that twenty-first-century malaise—loneliness—overtook her. Her sleep was disrupted. She often found herself wide awake before dawn, her mind whirring and worrying.

Claire found comfort in ASMR. What is ASMR? If you are younger than thirty you likely already know and may have bookmarked your own diet of its digital offerings. If you are over thirty, it sounds like another mysterious acronym of a younger generation mocking your dance moves and coming to take your job.

ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. This indecipherable mouthful of words refers to a constellation of sensations in your body, including tingles in your spine, shoulders, the back of your neck, and on the crown of your head. The poet Walt Whitman was perhaps thinking of this sensation in writing about the “body electric.”

How people like Claire find ASMR is where the story gets strange. There are millions of ASMR videos online. These videos often feature a person, filmed up close, whispering and carrying out actions as if moving closer to you, the viewer. The person may make sounds of daily living—of chopping food, tapping countertops, rustling cellophane packaging, or intimate conversation. Or the tongue clicking in a moistened mouth, gentle lip smacking, the sounds of eating, and, from South Korea, a whole ASMR genre of slurping shellfish. Videos of caregiving acts in intimate spaces—dental procedures, chiropractic adjustments, or ear cleanings—can also trigger ASMR.

For Claire, experiencing ASMR soothed her anxiety; it gave her a strange sense of comfort. Of place. Even home. At the end of our conversation, I ask her what it all means. She reflects:

It is like being surrounded by the sounds from childhood. Hearing your parents talk at dinner. The clinking of silverware on plates and the wood table. It feels like when your mom comes close to say good night as you drift off to sleep. They are the sounds of being surrounded by intimacy. The first years of life. Of being embraced.

What are we to make of this possibility, that certain kinds of chills are registers of the idea of having someone you love approach you, of being surrounded by the sounds of home? The framework for an answer is found in William James’s letters to his brother Henry, the great novelist. These letters include vivid descriptions of back pains, upset stomachs, tingly veins, and bodily fatigue. The dramas in the minds of these highly sensitive brothers played out in the sensations of their bodies, and would lead William to one of his most enduring ideas: Our mental life is embodied. Our conscious experience of emotions, and the lenses through which we perceive our lives—in the case of awe, that we are part of something larger than the self—originate in bodily sensations and their underlying neurophysiology. For James, “our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame.”