It’s goosebump season: get your frisson on
Sounds or sensations that give you the chills can also be pleasurable
The couple onscreen clutches and embraces, but the music that drifts over them is eerie, uneasy.
Alone in a dark theatre, you feel a chill race up your spine.
Walking home after a late night, you hear footsteps behind you. And just as you notice the sound, the footsteps quicken. The hair on your forearms stands on end.
It’s goosebump season, that pre-Halloween period that promises something sweet, laced with something scary. Some people wait all year for those thrills; others don’t have to.
The phenomenon of “chills,” provoked not by cold but by emotion or esthetics (or a combination of both) is a sought-after commodity, both by people who seek out triggers for the feeling, known as frisson, and by scientists who study what’s going on in our brains when we get that tingle.
Some people, it turns out, feel frisson, which has also been called a “skin orgasm,” more easily than others. You might sit through the most chilling movie and never feel a thing — or get serious shivers from “A Star Is Born.”
Frisson is weird and ephemeral, and often dependent on the emotions we attach to what we see and hear.
Music is one of the most common frisson triggers and the one that is most often studied by scientists. Yet the piece of music that will cause frisson in any given research participant is highly individual.
“We have people bring in a piece of music that gives them chills,” said Matthew Sachs, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California who has studied the phenomenon. Even with hand-picked music, Sachs said, reproducing frisson in the lab isn’t simple. Reactions to music can change over time or be stifled by distraction or surroundings.
“It’s very tricky, and there are so many factors at play.”
Science has nailed down a few things about frisson, however. Like that the sound of a high note often triggers it.
“There’s something about the high-pitched sound that sort of shrill sound that is the fear trigger,” Sachs said. “When you hear it in music it’s beautiful because it’s surrounded by the background of the music, but the high-pitched voice still triggers that sort of warning — almost like a scream, right? So we know that people tend to get chills from high-pitched notes.”
Sachs’ favourite example of this is the backing track from the Rolling Stones song “Gimme Shelter,’ in which backup singer Merry Clayton wails “rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.”
“I’d say about 80 per cent of people get chills from that one,” he said.
The initial frisson response in the brain is, research shows, a leftover evolutionary response to danger.
“Biologically, the experience of chills or hair standing on end is usually a response to something surprising or unexpected.” Sachs said. “So the reaction to that unexpected sound prepares you to respond to something that might be threatening or threaten your ability to survive.”
It’s possible that your hair stands on end in an attempt to make your physical presence more aggressive or threatening — picture another Halloween classic, the frightened cat with arched back and raised hackles. When the cause of that fear response is esthetic, however, the brain shifts direction. After the initial shock, cognitive systems start reassessing the level of threat — and rapidly decide no action is needed.
“The feeling of the enjoyment,” Sachs said, “is that feeling of the reappraisal response.”
After hearing a piece of music several times, the initial surprise response is sometimes replaced with an anticipatory shock and the expectation that pleasure will follow immediately after.
“Some pieces of music will always give a person chills, no matter how many times they hear it,” Sachs said. If you find the right piece, you can have a reliable source of frisson at your fingertips, which is why more than 170,000 people have posted potential frisson triggers to the frisson Reddit group.
“It’s pleasure-seeking,” Sachs said.
The fact that frisson is also tied to emotion, personality and imagination makes it an even more highly charged, individual and elusive experience.
“People will often bring in a piece of music (that causes frisson) and have a story about it, “Sachs said. “A lot of times it’s, ‘this was playing at my friend’s funeral.’ But if you were playing Smash Mouth at the funeral, I don’t think you’d have the same reaction to that music. It probably wouldn’t cause chills. Emotion plays a big part, but the most universal triggers are a piece of music with the right sounds that is also attached to emotion.”
That explains highly touted frisson triggers such as Lady Gaga’s 2016 Super Bowl national anthem performance, which has been the darling of the frisson Reddit group.
Sachs’ research showed that the neural track between the auditory and pleasure centres of the brain was more robust in people who experience frisson, compared with people who do not, meaning that if you are someone who gets the chills, the physical structure of your brain might enable that sensation. It also might help explain why music figures so prominently in discussions of frisson.
Frisson has also been shown to be a marker for the personality trait known as openness to experience: If you get the chills from music, you are likely to have a higher level of the trait, which connotes enjoyment of new experiences, but is also tied to things like imagination and creativity.
Imagination explains sentimental chills when hearing things like “Isn’t She Lovely” — it’s not so much the music, but imagining Stevie Wonder’s intense joy at the birth of his daughter that gets the frisson going.
The openness personality trait has gotten a lot of attention lately, as a trait more likely to be found among people who identify as liberals than those who identify as conservative. It’s also been shown to decrease with age, meaning that research subjects score higher in openness in their teens and 20s.