The Reason Music Gives You Chills

Music is tied to all sorts of feelings, from motivation to melancholy, to something electric—read as "those uncontrollable urges to dance". It's clear there's a psychological connection, but researchers at the University of Southern California believe there's a more direct link between the acoustic processing and emotional centers in our brains. They decided to scan the brains of 20 participants to understand why certain music gives you chills.

Let's look at simple examples: listening to "Princes of the Universe" followed by "Who Wants to Live Forever" can take you from a feeling of invincibility to almost immediate sadness. At the same time, no one can deny the motivational power of tracks like "Eye of the Tiger" or "Burning Heart". But there's also the detail that these songs are easily associated with powerful imagery thanks to the movies they appeared in.

In most cases, those images aren't there (beyond any official video), and still some tracks give you chills. What's happening at that moment? Why does the body react that way to an acoustic stimulus? Matthew Sachs from USC, with help from Harvard and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, decided to find out.

The Study

More than 200 people participated in the online questionnaire, and from there, the researchers narrowed it down to 20, forming two groups of ten: "Chill" and "No Chill". Before scanning their brains, the twenty participants entered the lab with their personal playlists, which they considered the most pleasurable to them. Combining those tracks with others used as reference, it was discovered that only half felt the famous chills.

The next step was brain monitoring through diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging, which allows visualizing how connected different brain regions are, and the quality of neural communication between them. Thanks to this process, it was discovered that participants with chills have a greater number of nerve connections between the primary auditory cortex and two other regions: the anterior insular cortex (which processes feelings) and the medial prefrontal cortex, which many experts see as an "emotion monitor".

Why is this so interesting? Sachs explains that chills are a response to cold, and it doesn't make sense (at first) that music triggers something similar. While the study detected these differences in neural connectivity, Sachs adds that it would be very difficult to establish whether they are acquired over time, or if it's a "natural condition". Also, we can't ignore the fact that the participant group was relatively small, and only 50 percent revealed additional activity. It's an interesting indicator, but nothing conclusive in the end.

Source: The Guardian