"Via a psychedelic music aficionado acquaintance - Is this something you've heard of?"

A reader [ADDED: Hazy Dave] sends me this link and says:

As an old Audible Althouse listener, I can understand the appeal of having a friendly well-modulated voice in your ears (though I usually can't get through entire an podcast and I'm too impatient to listen to books, even while driving). But I guess I listen to music for the occasional goose-bumps or “bubbles in your head” experience. Listening to a young blonde whisper in your ear seems like cheating, if not outright pr0n... I may need to try this out with earbuds later, just to see if I get weirded out, or if it just seems funny, or what. "Unsettling" seems like a reasonable starting point, even (very quietly) through tinny office computer speakers.

Wow! I watched some of those ASMR videos, then went back to some Audible Althouse  — my 2005-2006 podcast project— they're all here [ADDED: or maybe not.] It really does seem like that ASMR stuff. Truly strange from that perspective!

This reminds me a bit of Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North" and my own practice of falling asleep and sleeping playing an audiobook, a book read by a man with a gentle voice (almost always Bill Bryson, David Rakoff, or David Foster Wallace).

At the first link:

If... you’re one of the people the video was made for—one of those people who experience Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—you’ll probably find all six minutes incredibly satisfying, the video equivalent of a really nice, mellow kind of drug that leaves no aftertaste....

ASMR is a tricky feeling to describe, and I can only talk about it secondhand. From what I understand from conversations with ASMRers, it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine....