Often when I’m listening to music, I get this sensation on my skin I might describe as “shivery”. It feels similar to a feeling I get when I’m shivering–though I do not, in fact, shiver when I’m listening to music.
Is this common? What is it? Has any research figured out anything about its mechanisms and causes and so on?
I get the same feeling very occasionally when I witness a particularly significant and revelatory moment in a movie or read about one in a story.
I wish I could say I only get this sensation when hearing good music, but sadly that is not the case. I get the sensation when listening to all kinds of music, including very bad ultra low-brow pop music.
There’s a great book I’m reading right now called Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Anticipation by David Huron that addresses this and many other neurological effects.
The sensation you’re experiencing is called frisson. It seems to be an aborted fear response. When music is processed by the brain it travels simultaneously through different neurological pathways and many of the effects that music produces are triggered by how these different pathways overlap and interact.
Your body’s fast-track response to ANYTHING unexpected is fear. If you don’t know what something is, the safest thing to do is to treat it like it’s dangerous. So within a few milliseconds of an unexpected stimulus, your fight or flight response starts to ramp up.
But there are also slower neural pathways that are more discerning. They take time to analyze the stimulus to determine if the reflexive fast-track response was justified. If it wasn’t, they abort it.
Laughter, awe, and chills are all different variations of the same neurological cascade. Laughter and awe seem to be modified fear-based breathing changes – panting for the former and gasping for the latter. Chills are a remnant of the piloerection response. It’s the same physical response that cats use when they puff up when confronted by a threat. Because the defensive display is also used to help retain heat in cold weather, it’s perceived as a temperature change when it’s really not.
Of course, humans don’t have enough hair for piloerection to do much good either as a threat display or a way of retaining heat. But we still feel the hair stand up on the back of our necks when we’re scared and get goosebumps when we’re cold.
Musical frissons seem to be correlated with (1) loud passages, and (2) passages that contain some violation of expectation, like an abrupt modulation.
Holy crap, it’s like that time people argued for years about piss shivers, and didn’t make the connectiont that they’re actually shudders. It’s like we’ve all forgotten of them as an actual phenomenon.
Shuddering is typically a response to something negative, objectionable, disgusting (“I shudder to think”), which is how I usually get them. Also, of course, fear. But I suppose you can get them from anything emotional.
I agree that music, with its winding and unpredictability, causes excitement and hightened emotion. And that it’s tangentially related to other states of stimulation, which are related to the state of fear. But, on the whole, what you’ve said is ridiculous.
Unpredictability and surprise, whether in music, humor, or awe, is something that affects us through our intelligence, is something that requires our highest pattern-processing. It forms bonds among people who are comfortable with each other and have a shared past, on the basis that 1) people who are nervous and uncomfortable will have impaired thinking to get jokes (and will also act–laugh, dance, etc.–in a stilted, apparent matter) and 2) newcomers won’t understand the jokes, nuances of music, etc. [Plus a bunch of other related points.] It’s not an “aborted fear response.”
But shuddering… I still don’t understand. Might be some vestigial communication instinct. We still do fake shudders to communicate disgust or disagreement. (Like, girl 1: “hey, what do you think of Rob?” girl 2: fake shudder). Probably the origin of the shaking-head-meaning-no.
Why do we shiver in response to fear? I don’t see any connection to piloerection. I understand shivering in response to cold–it generates heat–by why fear?
Your position is not supported by the research on the subject.
From the book I mentioned above, page 281:
“In 1991, John Sloboda from Keele University carried out the seminal study of musically evoked frisson. Sloboda distributed a questionnaire soliciting information from music-lovers concerning passages that evoked strong emotions, including ‘shivers’ or ‘chills’. Some eighty-three responses were received. … He found that shivers or chills (frisson) are correlated with sudden changes of harmony and with abrupt changes in dynamic level.”
A musical chill is not a high-level aesthetic judgment. (In fact, as **Frylock **points out, he gets it with both bad music and good.) It’s a low-level neurological response to an unexpected stimulus that is followed afterwards by a neutralizing high-level assessment.
Another salient point, from page 283:
“In Sloboda’s study, respondents reported that even after listening to a passage fifty times, the passage continued to be able to evoke a frisson response.” The fact that the stimulus continues to produce the same response over and over again suggests that it is more akin to a reflex than to higher-level aesthetic cognition.
The piloerection response has two very different uses in animals with fur: It helps them retain heat better, and it makes them look bigger and scarier. The “chills down your spine” fear response seems to be a case where piloerection is mistakenly interpreted by your body as being triggered by cold instead of fear.
I can’t refute the research you cite… but for me, the shiver starts when I’m anticipating some section of the music coming up. I can’t recall a single time I felt that reaction when listening to music the first time.
So, for me, it may be a low-level response, but the response is to high-level thinking (memory of the song) and an expected stimulus.
I don’t think Huron (who I’m quoting) would disagree. Apparently the frisson response gets stronger as we become more familiar with a piece.
“Because the fast-track brain never lowers its guard, musicians can rely on sounds to evoke pretty much the same response each time the music is heard. If the fast-track brain weren’t so pig-headed in its pessimistic interpretation of surprise, then familiar musical works would rapidly lose their power to evoke the emotions of frisson, laughter, and awe. Of course, listening does change with exposure. But the fast-track brain responds primarily based on schematic expectations, and these schemas change only with extensive exposure.” [Emphasis mine.] Page 36 of Sweet Anticipation.
As soon as I saw this, I ordered the book. I am thinking that it is an updated and psycho-neurological treatment of an idea that I first saw many years ago in Leonard B. Meyer’s book, *Emotion and Meaning in Music. * It’s a fascinating and totally compelling explanation of the basis for aesthetic judgments we make. I loved his ideas and find them completely valid as to why we find some music satisfying and some is not. (The only thing it doesn’t explain for me is why Bach, which is quite predictable - almost by definition - is so sublimely beautiful and satisfying. This is one reason why I’m eager to read the Huron book.)
Huron cites Meyer approvingly. Basically his attitude is “Meyer was on the right track and now we know a whole hell of a lot more about how the brain works so we can back up his intuitions with actual research.” I haven’t read Emotion and Meaning and Music yet but it’s sitting on the floor of my bedroom in the queue.
Hmmm. Bach’s “gigue” fugue just happened to be playing and I realized that familiarity, anticipation, and resolution are a huge part of my enjoyment of that piece because of the way that themes, and their offspring, come in and disappear throughout. I don’t know why that never struck me before.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. How does this relate to shivering? You’re not suggesting that piloerection in response to fear is mistaken for piloerection in response to cold, leading to shivering, are you? That would be one crazy, poorly functioning system of regulation.
“Why is it that when we experience fear we feel chills but when we feel cold we don’t feel fear? … Piloerection almost certainly arose first as a means of thermoregulation. … Later, natural selection ‘discovered’ that piloerection is a welcome addition for creating a convincing aggressive display. … Once the neural wiring was added so that aggression generated piloerection, the phenomenal sensation of chills simply came along as an artifact.”
Sensation of chills in one thing; shivering is another. If he’s saying that’s why we shiver, I don’t buy it. In the 50 or so million years since natural selection ‘discovered’ piloerection as an aggression display it hasn’t figured out how to do it without wasteful shivering? And that’s not the only thing wrong with what he said. What’s his basis for this claim? And is he a biologist?
Sigh. Why do people post something like that, seemingly reflexively, whenever the evolution of some trait is discussed?
As it happens, I’m an evolutionary biologist. A biologist would not respond to my point that way. But, hey, perhaps we can all pick up some tips about how evolution reallly works from the Straight Dope message board.
You buy Huron’s evolutionary story about why we respond to fear with shivering (if that’s what he’s saying), but you dismiss my suggestion that selection would lead to piloerection without shivering? You’re welcome to your opinion.