Music - Chills/Opioids!

There is an intimate and telling three-way connection between certain kinds of music, feelings of either great sorrow or great joy, and the body sensations are described as "chills" or "shivers" or "thrills". For curious reasons, certain musical compositions, evoke emotive states that include a host of skin responses such as making the hair stand on end, producing shudders, and blanching the skin. Perhaps nothing is more illustrative for our purpose than evidence from a study conducted by Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre. They wanted to study neural correlates of pleasurable states caused by listening to music capable of evoking chills and shivers down the spine. The investigators found those correlates in the somatosensing regions of the insula and anterior cingulate, which were significantly engaged by musically thrilling pieces. Moreover, the investigators correlated the intensity of the activation with the reported thrill value of the pieces. They demonstrated that the activations were related to the thrilling pieces (which individual participants handpicked) and not to mere presence of music. Curiously, on other grounds, it is suspected that the appearance of chills is caused by the immediate availability of endogenous opoids in the brain regions modified by these feelings. The study also identified regions involved in producing the motive responses behind the pleasurable sates -- e.g., right orbitofrontal cortices, left ventral striatum, and regions that were negatively correlated with the pleasurable state -- e.g., right amygdala -- much as our own study did.