Thrills and Chills -- and Dopaminergic Spills?

Scenario: You’re listening to one of your favorite pieces.  Suddenly some cue in the music makes your heart feel like it might beat out of your chest and your skin start to tingle. Within seconds your arm hairs are standing straight up, a wave of chills runs down your spine and you are covered in goose bumps.

The first time this happened to me I think I was about 12 singing along to a hymn from the pew of my church. I thought for sure what I was feeling was the Holy Spirit coursing through my veins! Not to write off any divine experience my 12-year old self was having, but it turns out that there were some other things going on – mostly in my brain.

It’s been known for a while now that lots of human behavior is reinforced by activity in our brains that makes us feel good. For the most part these feelings of pleasure are meant to encourage us to keep doing things that tend to help our species survive, i.e. having sex or eating delicious food (although highly addictive drugs like cocaine are thought to influence similar reward systems as well). These types of behavior trigger the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine that flood areas deep within our brains. These neurotransmitters have a sort of domino effect on neuronal communication and pretty soon your entire brain is aware that you just did something pretty pleasurable.

But what about my 12-year-old self with the goose bumps?? According to research by Blood and Zatorre, my euphoric response to the music is another product of this type of reward circuitry in areas of my brain like the ventral striatum and the midbrain. This seems pretty cool to me. Listening to music doesn’t really fit into the category of “human survival skills,” right? So why does my brain give me such a strong reward when I listen to certain pieces of music?

I’m not sure if anyone knows the answer to that, but it may be the key to why people say they listen to music to de-stress or relax. The chills phenomenon is already being put into use for people with chronic pain and post-op patients who report lower levels of pain after listening to pleasurable music. Perhaps it could also be used to help addicts stave off cravings for abusive drugs.

The only problem is that not everyone experiences the music chills. Nusbaum and Silvia reported that you are more likely to get these musical goose bumps if you have an open personality type. It is also more common for people who have studied music extensively or who rate music as being a very important part of their lives to experience the phenomenon. Although there are some specific aspects of music that seem to reliably induce chills, such as unexpected harmonies or intense crescendos, the phenomenon is very individualized. While I might shiver every time I hear Beethoven’s 9^th, you may get goose bumps from Sinatra. Do you have a song that you can always count on to provide thrills, chills and dopaminergic spills?

Sources and further reading:

Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions Implicated in reward and emotion. PNAS, 98(20), 11818-11823.

            DOI: 10.1073/pnas.191355898

Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R., & Altenmüller, E. (2005). How does music arouse “chills”? Investigating strong emotions, combining psychological, physioplogical, and psychoacoustical methods. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060, 446-449.

DOI: 10.1196/annals.1360.041

Nusbaum, E. C., & Silvia, P. J. (2010). Shivers and timbres: personality and the experience of chills from music. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 000(00), 1-6.

DOI: 10.1177/1948550610386810