Why Does Music Give You Chills?

It usually arrives at a particular moment. A voice rises, the band drops out, a chord shifts where you did not expect it, and a shiver runs across your scalp and down your back. The hair on your arms stands up. Researchers call it a chill, or frisson.

Most people say they have felt it at some point. Some people get it often. Others seem never to experience it at all. Over the last fifteen years, neuroscience and personality research have started to explain both what the chill is and why it is so unevenly shared.

What happens in the brain

In 2011, Valorie Salimpoor, Robert Zatorre and colleagues at McGill University used a brain scan that can detect the release of dopamine, the chemical messenger most associated with reward. While people listened to music that moved them, the scans showed dopamine release in the striatum, a deep brain region involved in reward, at moments of peak emotional arousal.

Then they scanned the same listeners with functional MRI to follow the timing. They found a division of labour. One part of the striatum, the caudate, was more involved while people were anticipating the peak. Another part, the nucleus accumbens, was more involved during the peak itself.

That split matters. It suggests that much of the pleasure of music comes from prediction: the brain learns where a piece is heading, builds expectation, and rewards itself when the moment lands. It also puts music, an abstract pattern of sound, in the same reward system that responds to food and other tangible rewards.

Proof that dopamine is involved

Brain scans show correlation. To test cause, a team led by Laura Ferreri in Barcelona ran a double-blind study in 2019 with 27 healthy volunteers. In three separate sessions, each person took levodopa, a drug that increases dopamine availability, risperidone, which blocks dopamine, or a placebo, and then listened to music.

Levodopa increased how much people enjoyed the music and how motivated they were by it. Risperidone reduced both. It was the first direct evidence that dopamine plays a causal role in musical pleasure, not just a correlate of it.

Who gets chills?

In 2011, Emily Nusbaum and Paul Silvia asked young adults about their personality, their musical habits and how often they got chills. The strongest predictor was openness to experience, the personality trait linked to imagination, curiosity and sensitivity to art and beauty. Interestingly, the link did not run through taste in genres. It ran through engagement: open people listened to music more often and valued it more, and that engagement predicted chills.

Mitchell Colver and Amani El-Alayli tested this in the laboratory in 2016. They gave 100 college students a full personality inventory, then played them five pieces chosen to produce frisson, measuring chills through both self-report and changes in skin conductance. People higher in openness had more frequent chills, and the link held for five of the six facets of openness, including fantasy, aesthetics, feelings and ideas. The authors suggested that paying close mental attention to the music might matter more than emotion alone.

There may also be a physical side. In 2016, Matthew Sachs, Psyche Loui and colleagues surveyed 237 people and then compared ten who reliably got chills with ten who rarely or never did, matched for age, gender, personality and musical training. Using a brain imaging method that traces white matter, they found that the chill group had stronger connections between auditory areas and regions involved in emotional and social processing, such as the insula and medial prefrontal cortex.

When music does nothing

At the far end of the scale are people for whom music brings almost no pleasure at all. In 2014, Ernest Mas-Herrero and colleagues identified healthy people without depression or a general loss of pleasure who rated pleasant music low and showed no bodily response to it, despite perceiving music normally. They still responded normally to winning money. The researchers called this specific musical anhedonia.

A 2016 brain imaging study by the same group compared three groups of 15 people with different sensitivity to musical reward. In the anhedonic group, the nucleus accumbens responded less to music but normally to a gambling task, and the connection between the right auditory cortex and the reward system was weaker. People who loved music more than average showed the opposite: stronger connectivity.

What this does and does not mean

These studies are exciting, but many of them are small. The white matter study compared twenty people, the drug study had 27, and most participants were students or young adults in Western countries. Personality findings are correlations: openness predicts chills, but that does not show that one causes the other.

It also does not mean that people who never get chills are missing out on music. Chills are one marker of intense pleasure, not the only one. Plenty of people love music deeply without ever feeling a shiver. And musical anhedonia is not a disorder to diagnose from a quiz; it is a research category describing a small group of people with an unusual pattern of responses.

What this means for you

A few ideas follow from the research.

• Listen actively. The personality studies suggest engagement is part of the route to chills. Full attention, without doing something else, gives the brain's prediction machinery something to work with.
• Let familiarity build. Because anticipation is part of the reward, knowing where a piece is going may make the peak land harder.
• Do not measure yourself by goosebumps. If music moves you in quieter ways, that is still music doing its job.
• Notice what triggers you. When a chill arrives, pay attention to what the music is doing at that moment. It tells you what your own prediction system responds to.

If you are curious about your own relationship with music, our music reward test looks at the pleasure you get from it, the musical sophistication test at how you engage with it, and the aesthetic sensitivity test at how strongly beauty in general affects you.