Why does certain music cause chills

Your body temperature rises. Blood redirects to your legs. Your cerebellum—mission control for body movement—becomes more active. Your brain flushes with dopamine and a tingly chill whisks down your back. About 50 percent of people get chills when listening to music. Music, it seems, may affect our brains the same way that sex, gambling, and potato chips do. Making good predictions is essential for survival. But music is tricky. It can be unpredictable, teasing our brains and keeping those dopamine triggers guessing.

The study was conducted on a sample of 18 people and builds off of past research that suggests music is linked to activation of the brain's pleasure centers.

First author Thibault Chabin is a Ph. He tells Inverse that musical pleasure activates some of the reward processing circuits as other "basal" forms of pleasure do, like food or sex. Listening to music can also lead to dopamine release — the hormone associated with pleasurable experiences, he says. At the same time, it's not clear why music should have that power of our pleasure systems.

The study was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Music and the brain — Past studies on music and pleasure analyzed neurotransmitters and used fMRI imaging to show that music causes two waves of pleasure in the brain. A study in Nature reported that, when a song's played, there's first a period of anticipation and then, finally, a release.

The chills hit and dopamine is released. This new study is based EEG readings, which measure electrical activity. The idea was to see if there were changes in the brain's electrical activity that could also underpin a relationship between music and pleasure.

Did you feel chills, a lump in your throat, or perhaps a tingling sensation on the back of your neck? Then you might have a more unique brain than you think. A study , carried out by PHD student Matthew Sachs at the University of Southern California, has revealed that people who get chills from music might have structural differences in their brain. The research studied 20 students, who listened to three to five pieces of music.

The researchers then took brain scans of all the participants. Instead, his study showed that people engaged in the music more intellectually, like trying to predict the melody or putting mental imagery to the music, were more likely to get a shiver when the music deviated from their expectations in a positive way. But not everyone is so enthusiastic about the idea of discerning beauty from brain scans.

Jason Daley is a Madison, Wisconsin-based writer specializing in natural history, science, travel, and the environment. Post a Comment.