Goosebumps: our bodies’ involuntary reaction to situations of heightened emotional intensity, physical frissons that we can’t ignore, we can’t control, and we can hardly explain. And of all the artforms that gives us goosebumps most passionately, it’s music that reaches the parts that nothing else can.
Why does music make our spine tingle?
But where do they come from? Why does our hair stand on end, why do our spines tingle, why does our flesh turn into poultrified feverishness when we listen to the climax of Ravel’s Asie, when the holy grail is revealed to Wagner's Parsifal, or when the larks trill in the sunset of Strauss’s extraordinary Four Last Songs? While the physiological processes are pretty well understood, we haven’t been able to say too much about why they happen. Why do our bodies do this to us at moments of musical and emotional climax? What’s the use of goosebumps?
Thanks to the neuroscientist Diana Omigie and the Music, Mind and Brain research group at Goldsmiths, we’re getting to know more about their evolutionary origins. Observing how different parts of our brain are engaged at those spine-tingling moments, Omigie says that our ‘dopaminergic’ systems are engaged, meaning the neurotransmitters that relate to dopamine. And while we might think dopamine is all about giving us pleasure, it’s really a hormone that’s released when our senses are attuned to imagining a potential outcome of a situation, and being satisfied – or surprised – when our predictions are confirmed, or denied.
'The music’s power to turn us into a mass of goosebumps never diminishes'
That’s why, however much you hear those spine-tinglingly radiant phrases at the end of Brahms’s Third Symphony – or whatever symphonic conclusion most moves you – the music’s power to turn us into a mass of goosebumps never diminishes. Our expectations are met every time when we hear the piece, and its power to give us the chills only increases.
And there’s more. Diana says that the chills and tingles are also part of our fight-or-flight response – triggered in the oldest and deepest parts of our brains – and that our bodies are reacting the way they do because they’re trying to calm our systems down in the wake of emotional extremis. Which means that goosebumps are unconscious acts of physiological regulation in response to all that dopamine flooding our systems.
And that sounds a lot less fun than the irresistible intensity we experience when we’re in the throes of the music that gives us the biggest goosebumps. Yet that fleeting feeling of ecstasy makes physical and emotional sense: we can’t sustain these peaks of anticipation and reward for more than a few seconds, and yet we’re always seeking them out in our listening lives.
Goosebumps are our bodies’ unconscious reward for our relationship with the pieces we love the most. And they’re proof of music’s ancient, animal power over our bodies.
