“Neither The Stimulus Nor The Listener Alone Usually Tells The Whole Story”: The Science Of Aesthetic Chills

I got chills, they’re multiplyin’

“Getting the chills” is not just a colloquial expression; for some people at least, it’s very real. Not everyone will be able to relate to the sensation, in much the same way that some people are soothed by ASMR-style videos while others (me) find themselves irrationally irritated. Horses for courses, and all that. 

When so-called “aesthetic chills” do happen in response to art or music, they can be visceral. Reported manifestations include “sidewise sensation of thrills in the upper dorsal part of the neck, or in the spine and back, shivers down the spine, tingling sensations in the arm, and more general diffuse bodily reactions,” according to a 2022 paper.

Pretty much any art form can evoke such a reaction, and it doesn’t only happen when you are a passive consumer of the art either. One study analyzed diaries kept by schoolchildren involved in a choral singing project at Liverpool Cathedral in the UK, and found evidence of aesthetic chill-like experiences, even if the kids didn’t have that language to describe what they were feeling.

Music is the most commonly studied art form in this field, which I would speculate has a least a tiny bit to do with logistics – it’s much easier to play Clair de Lune to someone lying in an MRI scanner than it is to show them the Mona Lisa. But people have reported aesthetic chills after viewing all types of visual art, reading poetry, looking at beautiful natural vistas, and even hearing speeches. 

One intriguing case study found that a patient who had experienced a stroke, causing lesions to the left hemisphere of the brain, still reported “feeling” chills when listening to certain passages of music, despite the fact that their brain injury prevented the usual physiological responses on the skin. Objectively, they could not be feeling chills; subjectively, they were. 

So, as well as the physical sensations people report, there’s a lot going on inside the brain too. How these two elements of the experience are linked is still a subject of research. 

“Chills have long proven useful for probing the neurobiological correlates of rewarding musical experiences,” Giacomo Bignardi, a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics who has been studying aesthetic chills, told IFLScience. “Over time, they became a valuable tool for understanding subjective responses to music, precisely because they offer a physiological correlate that can be measured.”

Neurobiological studies have been pointing towards an important role for dopamine. This neurotransmitter is often unfairly relegated to the status of simply the “pleasure chemical” – it’s involved in so much more than that, but it does play a central role in the brain’s reward circuitry.

“[Aesthetic chills] activate a specific brain network involving the [ventral tegmental area] and its dopaminergic projections to the mesocorticolimbic system, crucial for reward and motivation processes,” explains a 2024 review.

“The insular cortex’s role in interoception [a “sixth sense” that allows us to track what’s happening inside our bodies] significantly affects the emotional experience of chills, with individual differences in [aesthetic chill] propensity linked to personality traits, structural brain connectivity, and genetic factors.”

This question of who gets aesthetic chills and why is something that has been central to Bignardi’s research. 

“A natural and compelling next step”

“Two bodies of work particularly caught my attention,” Bignardi told me. “The first established that individuals who are less sensitive to music are also less likely to experience chills. At the far end of that spectrum are people with musical anhedonia, a condition characterized by blunted emotional responses to music, despite a preserved ability to experience pleasure from other sensory stimuli.”

Bignardi is first author on a recent paper that suggests there is a genetic component to musical enjoyment. The team undertook a twin study and found that “genetic effects contribute up to 54 percent of the variability in music rewards sensitivity”. After that result, “exploring the genetic underpinnings of chills [was] a natural and compelling next step,” said Bignardi.

Their most recent work has explored this in a dataset comprising genetic information from over 15,600 people in the Netherlands.

“We estimated that roughly 30 percent of the variation in chills is linked to family-related factors, of which about one-fourth was attributable to common DNA variants,” the paper reads. “Some genetic influences appear to be shared across music, poetry, and art, and are associated with individual openness to experience, including general artistic interests, while others may be unique to each domain.”

“These results suggest that genetics contributes to how strongly people respond to cultural experiences and pave the way for future studies on the genetics of sensitivity to art and music experiences.”

People who are more prone to chills from music tend to be more sensitive to music overall.

Giacomo Bignardi

From this evidence, we may conclude that there’s a genetic component to whether or not someone is likely to experience aesthetic chills. There’s also this thread running through a lot of prior work, which Bignardi too took inspiration from: the idea of “openness to experience.”

“The second line of work suggested that chills from art and poetry may serve as a cross-cultural marker of openness to experience (though I now believe more research is needed before we can speak confidently about the universality of such responses).”

“What makes this particularly intriguing from a practical standpoint was that, because proneness to chills tracks with openness to experience, many existing studies had already collected data on this trait. This made me think of proneness to chills from art and poetry has a resource that could be leveraged to deepen our understanding of what makes individuals differ in their sensitivity to the arts.”

Openness to experience in Bignardi et al’s recent study referred to “individuals’ interest towards the arts and self-reported active imagination.” They did indeed find a link between genetic indicators of this openness and susceptibility to chills.

I was personally intrigued by the factors that could make someone more likely to experience aesthetic chills. As a music lover and amateur musician, I’ve definitely experienced chills from music before, most recently just a couple of days ago at a concert. But I can’t recall having the same sensation in response to other art forms. Before finally conceding that maybe I just don’t “get” poetry, I asked Bignardi whether there was a link between prior experience or engagement with a particular medium and proneness to chills.

“People who are more prone to chills from music tend to be more sensitive to music overall, and individuals who report to be more prone to chills from art and poetry tend to be more sensitive to the arts in general.”

We can also look to certain features within a particular piece of music that are more likely to produce chills in susceptible listeners, as Bignardi explained.

“At the level of the music itself, structural features play a key role, e.g., sudden dynamic shifts, such as changes in loudness, or the entrance of a new instrument or voice, are some of the triggers. At the emotional level, the perceived emotionality and meaningfulness of a piece are similarly important.”

“As with many other experiences, however, chills ultimately arise from the interaction between the music being heard and the person listening to it: neither the stimulus nor the listener alone usually tells the whole story.”

There’s still a lot more research left to do before we’ll be close to knowing that whole story. Bignardi is hoping to expand the study the team did in the Netherlands to a more culturally diverse group, as we still have a lot to learn about how these experiences translate across human cultures and how universal they are.

At the same time, others are looking at ways that we might harness the phenomenon, since we know from testimonials and from the neurobiology underpinning them that aesthetic chills are pleasurable to experience.

For example, one recent study from the Institute of Advanced Consciousness Studies in the US investigated how combining a form of guided meditation with chills-inducing music could boost the positive psychological impact of the meditation. They found that “the occurrence of chills accompanied increased [self-transcendence]”, a state that they explain is “characterized by elevated mood, ego-dissolution, interconnectedness, and moral elevation.”

And now, new questions are arising. With the boom in generative AI, scientists are starting to ask whether AI-produced sounds and visuals can evoke the same emotional responses as human-made music and art. As one recent paper concluded, “Understanding these dynamics is crucial for harnessing AI's potential in media creation without undermining the intrinsic value of human creativity.”