Goosebumps at a symphony’s crescendo or a sudden shiver in front of a painting are not random quirks. They are part of a measurable physiological response that links sensory input to deep emotional circuitry in the brain. Emerging research suggests that this “aesthetic chill” is partly written into DNA, which helps explain why some people are moved to tears by a song while others hear the same notes as background noise.
Scientists now argue that the same genetic forces that shape traits like dimples or personality also help determine who feels those electric waves of pleasure in response to music and art. Brain scans, twin studies, and experiments with sound are all converging on a simple idea: some nervous systems are built to be more sensitive to beauty.
What frisson actually is inside the brain
Researchers use the French word “frisson” for the sudden rush of chills, goosebumps, or a lump in the throat that can arrive during a powerful piece of music or a striking image. Physiologically, frisson looks a lot like a mini fight-or-flight response, with tiny muscles in the skin contracting and heart rate shifting, but it is triggered by aesthetic meaning rather than immediate danger. As one explainer notes, this response “even has a name” and has been recognized as part of human nature since it was first described, which is why scientists now treat frisson as a legitimate object of study rather than a poetic metaphor, as detailed in Actually.
Inside the skull, frisson appears to involve a tight loop between auditory or visual regions and the brain’s reward and emotion hubs. When a song suddenly violates an expectation, or a painting reveals a hidden pattern, the brain registers surprise, then rapidly tags that surprise as meaningful. That tagging process recruits dopamine-driven reward circuits that are also active in addiction, which one overview likens to a finger that “lights up a room by merely flicking a switch” each time dopamine triggers a cascade of chemical reactions, as described in a discussion of how people get hooked in And just as. In frisson, that same circuitry is recruited for art rather than substances.
A unique brain wiring for musical chills
One of the most cited pieces of evidence that some brains are wired for chills comes from work led by Matthew A. Sachs while he was at Harvard University. The study, which involved collaboration between Harvard and University of Southern California researchers, compared people who reliably experienced frisson during music with those who did not. It found that the chill-prone group “actually have structural differences in the brain,” including more developed neural connections between auditory cortex and emotional centers such as the insula and prefrontal cortex, according to a summary of the research from Harvard University.
Other reporting on the same work notes that these extra connections involve white matter tracts that make communication between sound-processing and emotion regions faster and more efficient. A music psychologist summarizing the evidence for a general audience explains that “Brain structure” appears to differ in those who experience frisson, with “People who experience frisson” showing more white matter linking auditory and emotional areas so that the ear-to-emotion connection is “faster and stronger,” as described in a breakdown of five factors that influence chills in Brain. Together, these findings support the idea that frisson is not just about taste; it is about anatomy.
How scientists chase chills in the lab
Turning a fleeting shiver into data is not simple. Researchers like Matthew Sachs, now a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, have had volunteers bring in “a piece of music that gives them chills” and then monitored their bodies and brains while those songs play. Sachs has explained that “reproducing frisson in the lab is not simple,” because the context, mood, and personal meaning of a song all matter, yet carefully designed experiments still reveal consistent patterns in heart rate, skin conductance, and brain activity when chills hit, as described in coverage of his work that quotes “Matthew Sachs, University of” Southern California in Seeking the.
When researchers compare people who experience musical chills with those who do not, the differences show up both in structure and in function. One summary of the brain imaging work notes that “When analysing brain activity, the shivery group’s brains were reported to have a higher amount of nerve fibres connecting the auditory cortex to the emotional processing areas,” which suggests that some individuals are “wired to be more sensitive to music,” as described in a discussion of “High Note Hysteria” that highlights how the “shivery group’s” connectivity stands out in When analysing. Those findings line up closely with the structural differences identified in the Harvard and University of Southern California study.
The genetic fingerprint of aesthetic chills
Brain wiring is shaped by experience, but it is also guided by genes. A recent twin study on aesthetic chills concluded that “approximately 36% of variance in aesthetic chills experiences can be attributed to genetic factors,” which means a little more than one third of the difference between people who often feel chills and those who rarely do can be traced to inherited influences, according to researchers who examined how bodily sensations shape emotional experiences in 36%. The remaining variation likely reflects environment, culture, and personal history, but the genetic component is large enough to treat sensitivity to beauty as a partly heritable trait.
That conclusion fits with broader work on heritability. One overview of observable human characteristics notes that “Dimples are highly heritable, meaning that people who have dimples tend to have children with dimples,” while also emphasizing that such traits are usually shaped by more than a single gene and that “Because their exact inheritance pattern is not completely understood, dimples are likely controlled by one gene but also influenced by other genes,” as explained in Dimples. Personality shows a similar pattern: a review of twin studies reports that the “Big Five” personality traits have heritable components that explain “40” to “60%” of their variation, according to the “Abstract” which begins “According to twin studies, the Big Five personality traits have substantial heritable components explaining 40–60% of the variance,” as summarized in Abstract. If genes can influence dimples and broad personality, it is plausible that they also help shape who is prone to aesthetic chills.
Culture, sensory wiring and why some sounds hurt
Genes do not operate in a vacuum. Cultural experience can literally reshape neural circuitry, so that the same sound or artwork lands differently in different brains. One report on cross-cultural brain imaging explains that “But now scientists say it impacts the hard wiring of your brain,” referring to how culture, which already shapes “your food preferences and taste in music,” also alters connectivity patterns, as described in coverage of how “cultural differences alter brain’s hard wiring” that emphasizes the word “But” to mark the shift from psychology to biology in But now. Sensory scientists have also shown that vision and hearing are deeply intertwined, with “Calvert and” her colleagues, including Gemma Calvert, reporting that lipreading can activate the auditory cortex that usually responds when someone hears speech, as described in work on the brain as a “sensory smoothie” in Calvert and. That kind of multisensory wiring helps explain why a film score can feel inseparable from the image on screen.
