Have you ever gotten goosebumps when listening to music? I certainly have, but not everyone does. I notice I get the chills when listening to a part of the song that is really touching to me, but also even when there is a really nice tune. There is a name for this sensation: “frisson.” Scientists have not figured out exactly why this happens but their studies have supplied some theories.
The article from Discovery titled ‘What Getting Chills from Music Says About Your Brain’ states you may have a very special kind of brain if music hits you at the core. Researchers from the University of Southern California released a study that suggests that only about 50 percent of people feel frisson. So half of the world’s music listeners have very different brains than those who don’t experience those feelings.
So how are our brains different from other peoples’? Results from diffusion tensor imaging show that white matter connectivity between auditory perceptual regions and regions of the brain important for emotional and social processing reflect individual differences in the tendency to experience chills from music. The current findings confirm other reports that people who are emotionally empathetic have “higher white matter integrity in the temporal and frontal lobe regions.”
According to Discovery, “one report from 2007 found that individuals who experience frisson are more open to new experiences than others, and other studies described higher levels of creativity and intellectual curiosity. In other words, the appreciation of beauty is central to what makes us human, and frisson is just a super-charged version of that appreciation.”
In simpler terms, people who feel frisson are most likely empathetic. Stella Luna Therapy defines empathy as “the paranormal ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual.” Frisson is basically the same when it comes to brain activity, but just with music.
