Science tries to unravel the mysteries of chills | Health and wellness

This usually happens when a song or movie resonates with us. And also when remembering events (heroic, altruistic…) that are firmly rooted in our memory. Or experiencing intense personal moments such as a deep embrace, an overwhelming sense of belonging, or a powerful connection with other beings or with the vastness of nature. Sometimes the stimulus that provokes them seems melancholic. There may even be a certain amount of helplessness involved. But the physiological response is as pleasant as it is elusive when trying to explain it.

Its external manifestation is the hair standing on end (piloerection) and slight trembling. More subjectively speaking, the aesthetic cold – as literature calls it to distinguish it from the negative side that occurs during horror, or the purely physical cold that appears when we have a fever – allows for endless descriptions. One of hundreds of possibilities: a flash of icy tingling that runs down the back and spreads throughout the body. Some people compare it to a mini-orgasm. Or to a mystical and fleeting ecstasy. Poetry has been trying to capture its essence for thousands of years. And science has been trying to unravel this mystery for decades.

Felix Scholler of the Institute for Advanced Study of Consciousness in California has focused his work on answering the questions raised by these tsunamis of unleashed emotionality. Some expected ones: What are its most common triggers? Others put it astonishingly, even presciently: Can pleasurable sensations help people with mental health problems? He and his collaborators created ChillsDB, a database of music, films and speeches that especially give us goosebumps. The repository has earned a journal article in 2022 Nature. Thousands of Californians were exposed to its contents. Models machine learning, Schoeller explains during a video call, “they’re setting up the shot. “We want to produce as much cold as possible. And we increasingly know how to do this, depending on the personality, demographic characteristics and specific status of the person,” he says.

It is still not known for certain why this outbreak of comforting coldness occurs. Fertile ground for speculation, several hypotheses have attempted to uncover its evolutionary roots. The late neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp linked musical chills to social loss. In a widely cited 1995 study, Panxip showed that sad melodies shake us up much more than happy ones. And it suggested a possible connection between erect hair and our ability to induce loneliness. This theory, explains Tuomas Eerola, professor of music cognition at the University of Durham (UK), “links chills (always aesthetic) to thermoregulatory modulation, since isolation (even imaginary) can make us feel very cold.”

Scholler notes that “it is initially associated with tremors—muscle movements that produce heat and maintain a stable body temperature.” Although he adds that for him, “the important thing is that this happens regardless of thermal changes in our body.” And for countless reasons: from listening to Mozart to participating in a ritual or solving an equation. “Many people tell me that they can be created through thought,” he says.

The sequence repeated in his empirical observation seems clearer. Scholler knows her well. “A stimulus causes a reaction, which, although it comes from the brain, is manifested in the body, and the brain, in turn, interprets it as something important. Then we perceive everything else differently. It’s like a loop that includes the brain, the body and the surrounding reality.”

At the neurobiological level, it is also known that behind the hook-like hairs (at least when listening to music; other stimuli are not yet understood in this way), there is a hidden release of dopamine, the so-called pleasure hormone. Another landmark study, published in 2001 by Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre, was the first to discover that colds trigger the famous reward system that traps addicts in its suggestive web. Something else, Scholler emphasizes, is evident in its ephemeral duration: “There is a curious phenomenon of deactivation of the amygdala (the part of the brain that prepares us for fight or flight in the face of a perceived threat), exactly the opposite of what happens in response to fear, when which it is activated.” In a sense, aesthetic coldness tells us that there is no danger, that everything is going well.

The only way out

Etymology of the Spanish term in which heat and cold come together (in English it is coldand in French shiver, both are connected only with the second) – gives a clue to another of its features. Authors such as Matthias Benedek and Christian Kernbach associate this with a kind of reconciliation between opposites. It seems common when the merging of sadness and joy, pain and love ignites a spark. Eerola refers to a video of high school students honoring their deceased teacher with a tribute. haka, this high-voltage Maori warrior dance known as the signature dance of the New Zealand rugby team. “There is a resolved conflict in the scene, in which aggression cannot be separated from sadness as something we cannot understand, and where confusion is the only way out,” he asserts. Schoeller confirms that “mixed states, as if witnessing an act of great solidarity in the midst of tragedy,” tend to frighten us.

Expanding their view, both authors refer to the expression moves (Spanish for “to be touched”), which Scholler points out is “used in the affective neuroscience literature to classify states” such as chills, crying with joy, or a burst of vague optimism sometimes accompanied by a warm heart. a chest with which we could translate an English word buoyancy in a figurative sense (literally means the buoyancy of the physical body).

Cousin moves there would be a concept kama muta, a somewhat elusive Sanskrit term which in its new scientific aspect embraces the emotions of comforting, expansive love with a social dimension. In 2017, a group of psychologists and anthropologists from the universities of Oslo and California created Kama Muta Laboratory and since then he has devoted himself to the study of this emotional typology. In a 2020 study published in the journal Psychophysiology, these types of experiences have been found to increase piloerection rates and decrease heart rate. With its symbiosis of calm and exuberant bliss, a moment kama muta I think it’s honey in chill flakes.

Another doubt that scientists are trying to resolve concerns the enormous variability of experience. Some people get chills from time to time, and others don’t know what they are because they’ve never had them. In 2022, Giacomo Bignardi and his colleagues demonstrated this through an analysis of identical and fraternal twins born in Naturethat genetics partly determine our tendency to cringe when we read poetry or see art. The similarity in responses between identical twins was twice that of fraternal twins.

The same study also observed that women enjoy this experience more often than men, although without significant differences. And that as we get older, we are increasingly moved by poems or paintings. “If emotional peaks (peak of emotions in English, another category in which chills are usually classified) reflect something about ourselves, it makes sense that the longer we live, the more often they occur,” says Bignardi, who conducts research at the Max Planck School of Cognition in Leipzig (Germany). .). Paradoxically, he continues, it turns out that the opposite is found in musical chills: “There are no convincing results, but they seem to be more pronounced among young people.”

Eerola mentions obstacles in coding illnesses and generally in pointing a microscope at the details of a cold. One of them is obviously related to the location of the observation. “I wish we could study this in a real context, at concerts or among people relaxing at home with a couple of glasses of wine.” First of all, he continues, because it is by no means a “frequent or automatic reaction, except in people who are very open to this experience.” If we view this as a poor connection to orgasm, then an environment of scientific asepsis opens the door to emotional triggers. Not to mention that the experiment contains measurement artifacts in the form of cables and suction cups.

Despite these difficulties, Scholler does not give up his attempts to better understand all the intricacies of chills. He begins to “intuit” the common denominator among prolific people, so that this emotional peak is born: “The ability to absorb, focus on, and become immersed in a task.” Their research has shown that this electric and sparkling intrusion also produces – at least for a few moments – a very liberating feeling of self-transcendence. In another study, he also found that it helps “attenuate maladaptive cognitions” in depressed patients because it “promotes emotional disruption that challenges long-held beliefs about oneself.” For example, that we are useless or that we are doomed to fail. Scholler believes that with precise and prolonged exposure to proven effective stimuli (such as those stored in ChillsDB), the benefits may be more long-lasting, helping to change distorted thinking patterns. Loading sublimated emotions versus persistent self-flagellars.

You can follow EL PAIS Health and Wellness V Facebook, X And instagram.