It usually happens when a song or a movie strikes a chord with us. Also when remembering events (heroic, altruistic…) that took solid roots in our memory. Or by experiencing intense personal moments, such as a deeply felt hug, an overwhelming feeling of belonging, or a powerful connection with other beings or with the immensity of nature. Sometimes, the stimulus that provokes them seems melancholic. It may even contain a certain amount of helplessness. But the physiological response is as pleasant as it is elusive when trying to explain it.
Its external manifestation is hair standing on end (piloerection) and a slight shivering. More subjectively, the aesthetic chill—that is what literature calls it to differentiate it from its negative side, which emerges in terror, or the purely physical chill, which appears when we have a fever—admits endless descriptions. One of hundreds possible: a flash of icy tingling that crosses our back and spreads through the rest of our body. Some people compare it to a mini orgasm. Or to a mystical and fleeting ecstasy. Poetry has been trying to capture its essence for millennia. And science, decades trying to unravel its mystery.
Félix Schoeller, from the Institute for Advanced Studies of Consciousness, based in California, has focused his work on answering the questions raised by these tsunamis of unleashed emotionality. Some, expected: What are its most common triggers? Others, with a surprising, even visionary formulation: Can its pleasant sensations help people with mental health problems? He and his collaborators have created ChillsDB, a database with music, movies and speeches especially prone to giving us goosebumps. The repository deserved an article in the magazine in 2022 Nature. Thousands of Californians have been exposed to its contents. Models of machine learning, Schoeller explains over a video call, they are fine-tuning the shot. “We want to produce as many chills as possible. And we increasingly know how to do it depending on the personality, demographic characteristics and specific status of the individual,” he says.
It is still not known with certainty why this outbreak of comforting coldness occurs. In a fertile terrain for speculation, several hypotheses have attempted to reveal its evolutionary roots. The late neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp linked musical chills to social loss. In a much-cited 1995 study, Pankseep showed that sad tunes shake us up inside much more than happy ones. And he suggested a possible association between standing hairs and our ability to evoke loneliness. This theory, explains Tuomas Eerola, professor of musical cognition at the University of Durham (United Kingdom), “connects chills [siempre estético] with thermoregulatory modulation, since the insulation [siquiera imaginado] It can make us feel very cold.”
Schoeller subscribes that, “originally, it is associated with tremor, a muscle movement that produces heat and keeps the body temperature stable.” Although he adds that, for him, “the important thing is that it occurs regardless of thermal changes in our body.” And for countless reasons, from listening to Mozart to participating in a ritual or solving an equation. “Many people tell me that they can be generated through thought,” he says.
The sequence that is repeated in his empirical observation seems clearer. Schoeller knows her well. “A stimulus causes a response that, although it comes from the brain, manifests in the body and, in turn, the brain interprets as something important. Then we perceive everything else differently. It is like a loop that involves brain, body and surrounding reality.”
At a neurobiological level, it is also known that, behind the hairs like hooks (at least when listening to music; other stimuli have not yet been so dissected), there is hidden release of dopamine, the so-called pleasure hormone. In another landmark study, published in 2001 by Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre, it was found for the first time that, during the chill, the famous reward system that traps drug addicts in its suggestive nets is set in motion. Something else, Schoeller emphasizes, appears in its ephemeral duration: “There is a curious phenomenon of deactivation of the amygdala [la parte del cerebro que nos prepara para la lucha o la huida ante una supuesta amenaza], just the opposite of what happens in the fear response, in which it is activated.” In some way, the aesthetic chill tells us the absence of danger, it tells us that everything is going well.
The only way out
The etymology of the Spanish term—in which heat and cold converge (in English it is chilland in French, frisson, both associated only with the second)—gives a clue to another of its peculiarities. Authors such as Mathias Benedek and Christian Kaernbach have linked it to a kind of conciliation between opposites. It seems common for the fusion of sorrow and joy, or pain and love, to light its spark. Eerola refers to a video in which secondary school students honor their deceased teacher with a haka, that high-voltage Maori warrior dance famous for being the hallmark of the New Zealand rugby team. “There is a resolved conflict in the scene in which aggression cannot be separated from sadness, like something that we cannot understand and where mixing is the only way out,” he maintains. Schoeller confirms that “mixed states, as if witnessing an act of great solidarity in the midst of tragedy,” tend to chill us.
Broadening the view, both authors refer to the expression being moved (in Spanish, ‘to be moved’), which, Schoeller highlights, “is used in the literature on affective neuroscience to categorize states” such as chills, crying that springs from joy or that burst of vague optimism – sometimes accompanied of warmth in the chest—with which we could translate the English word buoyancy in its figurative meaning (in the literal sense, it means buoyancy of a physical body).
First cousin of being moved would be the notion of kama muta, a somewhat elusive Sanskrit term that, in its new scientific aspect, encompasses emotions of comforting, expansive love with a social dimension. In 2017, a group of psychologists and anthropologists from the universities of Oslo and California created the Kama Muta Lab and since then he has been dedicated to examining this emotional typology. In a 2020 study published in the journal Psychophysiology, it was found that these types of experiences increase levels of piloerection and decrease heart rate. With its symbiosis of calm and exuberant bliss, a moment kama muta It seems to be honey on flakes for the chills.
Another doubt that scientists are trying to resolve refers to the enormous variability of experience. Some people get chills every now and then, while others don’t know what it feels like because they’ve never had one. In 2022, Giacomo Bignardi and his collaborators demonstrated, thanks to an analysis on identical and non-identical twins published in Nature, that genetics partly determine the propensity to cringe when we read poetry or see art. The similarities in the response were twice as high between identical twins compared to non-identical twins.
In the same study, it was also seen that women delight more times in the experience than men, although without major differences. And that, as we grow older, we are moved more frequently by verses or paintings. “If the emotional peaks [peak emotions en inglés, otra categoría en la que suele incluirse al escalofrío] they reflect something about ourselves, it makes sense that the longer we have lived, the more those occur,” says Bignardi, who researches at the Max Planck School of Cognition in Leipzig (Germany). Paradoxically, he continues, it turns out that, in musical chills, the opposite is detected: “There are no conclusive results, but it seems that they appear more among young people.”
Eerola mentions the obstacles when coding the incidence and, in general, when putting the microscope on the details of the chill. One of them, obvious, has to do with the place of observation. “I wish we were able to study it in real contexts, at concerts or with people relaxing at home with a couple of glasses of wine.” Above all, she continues, because it is by no means a “frequent or automatic reaction except in people very open to the experience.” If we see it as a poor relation of the orgasm, an environment of scientific asepsis would pave the way for emotional triggers. Not to mention when measurement artifacts, with their cables and suction cups, are present in the experiment.
Despite these difficulties, Schoeller does not give up his efforts to better understand the ins and outs of chills. He begins to “intuit” a common denominator among fertile individuals so that this emotional peak is born: “The capacity for absorption, to be focused on a task and immerse oneself in it.” His research has revealed that this electrical and sparkling invasion also provokes—even if only for a few moments—a very liberating feeling of self-transcendence. In another study, she also found that it helps “mitigate maladaptive cognitions” in patients with depression, since it “fosters an emotional breakdown that calls into question long-held beliefs about ourselves.” For example, that we are useless or that we are doomed to failure. With accurate and prolonged exposure to proven effective stimuli (such as those stored by ChillsDB), Schoeller thinks the benefits could be longer lasting, thus helping to modify distorted thought patterns. Downloads of sublimated emotion against persistent self-flagella.
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