Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally
Speaker 1: aired June tenth, and this is the episode that our
Speaker 1: producer Seth and I did on musical free Son that
Speaker 1: feeling when you get shivers or goose bumps from listening
Speaker 1: to music. Uh so, yeah, we hope you enjoy. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. I'm Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick and my regular co host Robert Lamb is not
Speaker 1: with us today. He is out on vacation, but as
Speaker 1: a special treat I am being joined by our in
Speaker 1: house audio sorcerer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. Say Hi Seth, Hello, everyone,
Speaker 1: it's me Seth. How are you doing today? I'm doing great,
Speaker 1: happy to be on this side of the microphone, happy
Speaker 1: to help out with while Roberts out of town. And
Speaker 1: I'm very happy, um with the subject matter that you
Speaker 1: chose today. So I'm looking forward to this right We're
Speaker 1: so we're doing a musical themed episode today. Um, because Seth,
Speaker 1: you host another podcast. Do you want to tell listeners
Speaker 1: who are not familiar with the Record Store Society what
Speaker 1: it's all about? Surely? Um yeah. So obviously the main
Speaker 1: chunk of my time I spend producing this show stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. But I also do a weekly
Speaker 1: show with that I host with my co host, Tara Davies,
Speaker 1: and it's called Record Store Society, and um, basically, it's
Speaker 1: a podcast for music nerds, by music nerds, and it's um,
Speaker 1: full blown, just a talk show where people can just
Speaker 1: share recommendations things we've been listening to lately, what we love,
Speaker 1: play some music based games that you can't really play
Speaker 1: with other people because you're going very specific and very
Speaker 1: nerdy about your music tastes. But we pretend we're in
Speaker 1: a record store the whole time. That's the gimmick. That's
Speaker 1: the fun little gimmick where we just uh uh yeah,
Speaker 1: there's we have sound effects and all of our guests
Speaker 1: are customers and me and my co host are the
Speaker 1: employees of the record store and uh yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 1: It's called Record Store Society and you can find it
Speaker 1: wherever you find your podcasts. It's a great show, folks.
Speaker 1: I personally recommended in fact, Rob and I did a
Speaker 1: guest episode where we appeared on Record Store Society one time.
Speaker 1: How long ago is that now? Is a couple of
Speaker 1: months ago where we ended up talking. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: music videos. Yes, it was a great one and m Yeah,
Speaker 1: tons of fun everyone. If if anyone's in the mood
Speaker 1: for music talk, if you're looking for new music recommendations,
Speaker 1: or you just feel kind of lonely that you don't
Speaker 1: none of your friends, will you know, go on a
Speaker 1: deep dive about, you know, bootleg Neil Young albums. Then
Speaker 1: you know you can listen to Record Store Society and
Speaker 1: well we'll scratch that itch. Speaking of bootleg Neil Young albums,
Speaker 1: you ever see that video where he's like going around
Speaker 1: in record stores and he's finding bootlegs and he's like
Speaker 1: taking them without paying. Yes, I mean you love it.
Speaker 1: You know, there's something about a musical curmudgeon that always
Speaker 1: makes me very happy. And he's a good one. He's
Speaker 1: a very good musical curmudgeon. Yeah, yeah, it's great. He
Speaker 1: like takes it up. He's like, I'm on this record
Speaker 1: and I don't know what this is. Um, But so anyway,
Speaker 1: because Seth of the Record Store Society is joining us today.
Speaker 1: We thought we would talk about a musical topic, and
Speaker 1: I think we've got a really interesting one that ties
Speaker 1: up with neuroscience, big puzzles about how our brains work, emotions,
Speaker 1: the reward system in the brain, music and aesthetics and
Speaker 1: fear and UH and the autonomic nervous system and all that,
Speaker 1: and so what we're talking about today is those moments
Speaker 1: when music is not just fun or interesting or intellectually pleasurable,
Speaker 1: but when musical pleasure sort of grabs you at the
Speaker 1: level of the body, when it sends a shiver down
Speaker 1: your spine, or when it causes tingling on your skin
Speaker 1: or even feeling like it's under your skin, or when
Speaker 1: it raises goose by umps on your forearms or on
Speaker 1: your neck, or when it puts a lump in your throat. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about what is sometimes called
Speaker 1: free san or frisson uh in the words of one review.
Speaker 1: We're going to be looking at today it is a
Speaker 1: transcendent psycho physiological moment of musical experience. It's the it's
Speaker 1: the moment where music grabs you by the body and
Speaker 1: not just the mind. Now, Sathe you actually suggested this
Speaker 1: topic when we were batting around ideas about what to
Speaker 1: do today. Do you remember how this came to your mind?
Speaker 1: What's the story here? Um, it's a concept I very much. Um,
Speaker 1: I've done mild research into into the past. I'm a
Speaker 1: person who feels for song or however we're going to pronounce.
Speaker 1: How do you think you're going to pronounce it today, Joe, Well, dang,
Speaker 1: I've already been thinking, so I've been saying in my head.
Speaker 1: Free song comes from the French comes from a French
Speaker 1: word meaning shiver, shiver is a now and like he
Speaker 1: gave me a shiver. But but I've seen plenty of
Speaker 1: people also all it frissan so or frossan. So we're
Speaker 1: probably gonna jump around, but I'll try to be as
Speaker 1: annoying as possible about it. But I'll try to go
Speaker 1: with frees on as well. Um yeah, yeah, and um
Speaker 1: aesthetic chills is the is my favorite definition of freesan.
Speaker 1: And um, it's something I experience a lot. And as
Speaker 1: a big music fan, I've often thought, am I a
Speaker 1: big music fan because I acutely feel freesan very often?
Speaker 1: Or do I experience frees on often because I'm such
Speaker 1: a big music fan and I spend so much of
Speaker 1: my time listening to and thinking about it and diving
Speaker 1: deep and spending all my money on records and blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. Like it's a Chicken or the egg situation,
Speaker 1: which I don't think we can ever have an answer to,
Speaker 1: but it's an interesting idea. And um, I've also not
Speaker 1: too long ago learned that, of course, not everyone experiences it,
Speaker 1: which is another very strange aspect. When you feel something
Speaker 1: that you enjoy, like just like whether it be you know, um,
Speaker 1: the taste of something sour and you go, oh, other
Speaker 1: people don't taste sour, and you would go, wait a minute.
Speaker 1: I thought everyone had this, And that's that's kind of
Speaker 1: what I felt when I learned that frees on isn't
Speaker 1: something that everyone experiences. And anyway, you you're so good
Speaker 1: at researching things, I thought you would uh answer some
Speaker 1: questions for me. So I'm I'm I'm ecstatic with with
Speaker 1: what you've looked into already. Well, I don't think we're
Speaker 1: going to have full closure on all of the causes
Speaker 1: of this of this phenomenon today, but we can raise
Speaker 1: some questions and bring up some findings that point off
Speaker 1: an interesting directions This is one of those that I
Speaker 1: think is still somewhat of a puzzle. But there are
Speaker 1: a lot of pieces of it that are on the
Speaker 1: table now and you can arrange them around in different
Speaker 1: ways and get some ideas of what to do. But
Speaker 1: maybe it would be good to start describing really strong
Speaker 1: examples that unfortunately necessarily, I think these are going to
Speaker 1: have to be subjective. That we will talk about examples
Speaker 1: that affect us personally. But one thing you'll find is
Speaker 1: that you know, musical passages are especially prone to eliciting
Speaker 1: free song in many people, but there's nothing that's universal,
Speaker 1: So what gets you might not get somebody else, and
Speaker 1: vice versa. Um. But I I specifically have a memory
Speaker 1: from when I was in college of I guess a
Speaker 1: couple of days, or maybe it was even a stretch
Speaker 1: of a week where I was just listening to one
Speaker 1: song over and over again. I would like, maybe multiple
Speaker 1: times a day, put on my headphones, turn the volume
Speaker 1: way up, and just listen to the same song over
Speaker 1: and over again with my head bent down and my
Speaker 1: eyes closed. It was a song by by Rout that
Speaker 1: is called non Taste, and it has this moment where
Speaker 1: you know it starts off kind of quiet, and then
Speaker 1: suddenly it becomes loud. The rest of the band comes in,
Speaker 1: the rhythm kicks in, UH, and there's a there's clicking percussion,
Speaker 1: and and when that happens, I would just feel these
Speaker 1: waves of tingling and goose bumps, and I would do
Speaker 1: it over and over again, almost like I was addicted
Speaker 1: to it. It sort of colors my memory of my
Speaker 1: experiences of you know, that summer two thousand whatever it was. UH.
Speaker 1: And another thing is I was thinking, I still really
Speaker 1: love music, but I don't really do things like that anymore.
Speaker 1: I would sometimes do that with songs, especially when I
Speaker 1: was in high school and college. And it makes me
Speaker 1: kind of wonder if age might be a factor in
Speaker 1: in how often and how intensely you experience free song,
Speaker 1: or in how motivated you are to have the experience
Speaker 1: again and again. How does that line up with your
Speaker 1: experience It does, However, I would say that I don't
Speaker 1: believe mine has waned at all, and I'm not really sure.
Speaker 1: I can't explain that either. I can't explain why, um
Speaker 1: something that like when I was in like middle school
Speaker 1: and high school, I was always the kid with the
Speaker 1: largest CD collection. I had like the giant binder full
Speaker 1: of CDs and it was the only thing I cared about,
Speaker 1: and blah blah blah. And you know that at that
Speaker 1: time when music obsession is very very common. I think
Speaker 1: most people feel music obsession during those teenage through high school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess it's all teenage years. I often had people
Speaker 1: tell me, oh, when I was your age, I love
Speaker 1: music too, you'll grow out of it. I heard that
Speaker 1: again and again and again, and here I am knocking
Speaker 1: on middle age, and I haven't really changed too much,
Speaker 1: and I just kind of became a different kind of
Speaker 1: music fan, I guess, which is now why I host
Speaker 1: that music show too, and have hosted other music podcasts
Speaker 1: in my life. And that's why I run a record label.
Speaker 1: It's why I'm a musician. It's it's all these things
Speaker 1: that I do and really enjoy. So yes, I I
Speaker 1: fully agree with you that there is this thing that
Speaker 1: it must be something like a dopamine release. And we'll
Speaker 1: get more into like the specific details about what's happening
Speaker 1: chemically and all that kind of stuff later, But no,
Speaker 1: I I think I still feel it pretty acutely. I
Speaker 1: think I still um do obsess over songs far too much,
Speaker 1: and talk about music far too much, and go into
Speaker 1: all those things. And um, here's another thing that I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if we'll get too later. You and I
Speaker 1: are also both musicians in our own ways. You know,
Speaker 1: we are people who write, record and play music. Um,
Speaker 1: extremely amateur on my part, but yes, but that's still
Speaker 1: something that not a lot of people do. And I
Speaker 1: wonder if being a musician has something to do with
Speaker 1: this as well, something that has to do with that
Speaker 1: wiring your brain, that that self serving dopamine plunger, That
Speaker 1: that being a rat with a test and hitting the
Speaker 1: little buttons you can get your little food pellets. I
Speaker 1: can't answer these questions, but that's something that makes me
Speaker 1: think of sometimes when I'm playing something over and over
Speaker 1: and over again, whether I'm listening to it or with
Speaker 1: my hand I'm playing on a musical instrument, I think
Speaker 1: about that rats getting a food pellet. Like you're listening
Speaker 1: to that Bay Roots song, you know, it's just like
Speaker 1: and one more please and one more please. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of other songs that I mean,
Speaker 1: I know they're there are tons that are just not
Speaker 1: coming to mind, but I was making a list while
Speaker 1: we were getting ready to record this of moments and
Speaker 1: songs that I know regularly caused Free song for me.
Speaker 1: One is another one I was thinking of is the
Speaker 1: pre chorus in the song Alex Chilton by the Replacements.
Speaker 1: Do you know the part I'm talking about where the
Speaker 1: the verse transitions to suddenly the background harmonies come in,
Speaker 1: coinciding with the lines of the lyrics Children by the
Speaker 1: Millions sing for Alex Chilton on that party always does
Speaker 1: it for me? Um. I was also thinking about there
Speaker 1: is a there's an awesome soul song called into Something
Speaker 1: Can't Shake Loose by ov Right where I experienced Free
Speaker 1: song multiple points in the song, but especially as the
Speaker 1: intro has these chord changes on the piano along with
Speaker 1: uh sort of plaintive vocals uh cycling through the same lyrics,
Speaker 1: but with with these chord changes leading up to when
Speaker 1: the rhythm kicks in and the strings come in. Never
Speaker 1: never will a game saying loo no and uh yeah
Speaker 1: chills all over from it. I mean, I I think
Speaker 1: if you experience this, there definitely um high points that
Speaker 1: you can always remember. Like off off top of my head,
Speaker 1: there are always a couple of really strong examples UM,
Speaker 1: and perhaps some of these examples that we're listing, we'll
Speaker 1: be able to actually somewhat dissect and understand why these
Speaker 1: examples hold so strong for us. UM. There's a song
Speaker 1: called Modern World by Wolf Parade where basically the entire
Speaker 1: second half of the song is this building extended chorus.
Speaker 1: Ye we're just like you know, it's a it's repetitive,
Speaker 1: but maybe like every bar to another instrument is added,
Speaker 1: another element is added, and then like you're you're I
Speaker 1: I literally feel chills thinking about it right now because
Speaker 1: I can hear those notes in my head and there's
Speaker 1: something to do with pattern that really really brings you
Speaker 1: home and expectation. Um. There's there's also this really great
Speaker 1: song UM by Animal Collective called Banshee Beat that's very slow,
Speaker 1: very very very UM. It's a it's a languid song,
Speaker 1: you know, very stretched out, and then every once in
Speaker 1: a while, the lead singer A V. Taire just hits
Speaker 1: these notes where he says swimming pool feel, and it's
Speaker 1: like it erupts out of him like a volcano would
Speaker 1: erupt lava. And it's though those moments as well, they're
Speaker 1: there there there, I mean, and I also do think that,
Speaker 1: like you were saying before, it's very subjective. UM. For example,
Speaker 1: when I was talking about this with my wife Lizzie
Speaker 1: last night, and she showed me a Loofer Janya song
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, yeah, I know that song,
Speaker 1: and she's like, that's the one for me, that's the
Speaker 1: one that gives me the chills. And I'm like, not
Speaker 1: a great song, but I've never felt it for that
Speaker 1: and and so so I think you are correct where
Speaker 1: it is. Just it's a subjective feeling built into us individually,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it's shared, but I think quite often it's not.
Speaker 1: I think it's very personal most of the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting phenomenon that seems to involve both cognitive
Speaker 1: and emotional elements. Like it's cognitive in that uh sort
Speaker 1: of sort of knowledge and context matters, and like it
Speaker 1: it matters how much attention you're paying to the music,
Speaker 1: Like music that's on in the background is usually unlikely
Speaker 1: to cause free song. I don't know if you have
Speaker 1: the same experience. It's especially when you're really listening actively
Speaker 1: that it happens, especially at higher volume. UM. But the
Speaker 1: other thing is that it sometimes it gets the better
Speaker 1: of you, or at least in my experience, I can
Speaker 1: get free song from songs that um that I don't
Speaker 1: want to be unkind, but that I might regard as
Speaker 1: sort of like blatantly manipulative or what some people might
Speaker 1: call hack songwriting. You know, I don't like to just
Speaker 1: like crap all over music, but like, there there are
Speaker 1: songs that uh, that I like, but like I acknowledge
Speaker 1: that they're very cheesy. You know, they're not necessarily they
Speaker 1: don't convey emotional maturity, and yet they still can cause
Speaker 1: this intense reaction when I was thinking of is uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, there are several songs, probably by Jim Steinman,
Speaker 1: that do this for me. Who he hits it seems
Speaker 1: like he hits all of the bars. I was thinking
Speaker 1: about the song Nowhere Fast from the movie Streets of Fire,
Speaker 1: which is intensely cheesy Jim Steinman pop songwriting, but like
Speaker 1: on the pre chorus, when you know, the high voices
Speaker 1: come in, jumps up an octave and it's really loud,
Speaker 1: and I get the shivers, and I I um, I've
Speaker 1: definitely experienced the same thing, and that line between cheesy
Speaker 1: and emotional and what your body is actually taking in
Speaker 1: as opposed to perhaps what your brain thinks differently of it,
Speaker 1: Like there's like an intellectual and an emotional place where
Speaker 1: it hits you. And sometimes I'm not even sure if
Speaker 1: this is true. Um there's a feeling of embarrassment almost
Speaker 1: for the performer. And then you think to yourself, are
Speaker 1: these chills that I'm feeling part of free san or
Speaker 1: are these chills perhaps some sort of like almost like
Speaker 1: a cringe thing. And I think it's usually free song.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's usual be embarrassment, but they're they're
Speaker 1: They're not too good for Jim Steinmann exactly, but I
Speaker 1: do think they are like somehow, perhaps like neighbors in
Speaker 1: a way. And I think there is something about emotional
Speaker 1: poll compared with intellectual poll, and them working in tandem
Speaker 1: can create this emotion becauseuse at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: a lot of music is just math. It's a lot
Speaker 1: of patterns, it's a lot of um time signatures, it's
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, hitting things at the correct time.
Speaker 1: And so in addition to that, there's that's the intellectual side,
Speaker 1: and then there's the performance aspect, which brings an emotional side,
Speaker 1: and that can I I am going down a rabbit
Speaker 1: hole here. But I think you understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, totally. UM. One last example for people
Speaker 1: to think about, maybe before we move on to UH,
Speaker 1: to dissecting the concept a little bit more is UH.
Speaker 1: This is one example I came across by way of
Speaker 1: a researcher named Matt Sacks. I was watching an interview
Speaker 1: with him that I found on the internet and UH
Speaker 1: and he mentioned that in demonstrating musical free song in
Speaker 1: his lectures, he used an isolated track of the background
Speaker 1: vocals from the song Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones.
Speaker 1: And those background vocals are sung by a singer named
Speaker 1: Mary Clayton. And when you when you when I hear
Speaker 1: them in the song, I mean, I love Gimme Shelter.
Speaker 1: It's classic rock song and it's great. But the song
Speaker 1: itself does not give me chills. However, the isolated background
Speaker 1: vocals by Mary Clayton absolutely give me chills, it all
Speaker 1: up and down the body. Uh. And and I think
Speaker 1: that's interesting too, that you could actually heighten the effect
Speaker 1: in some cases by removing other elements and isolating just
Speaker 1: one part of a song. Uh. And Sax has actually
Speaker 1: said in this interview, I was watching that. Um, something
Speaker 1: like nine percent of people say that this one example
Speaker 1: gives them chills. It seems to be like a sort
Speaker 1: of home run example to use. Let's try it on
Speaker 1: our audience for a seconds now. We're gonna give you
Speaker 1: the caveat here that because of legal fair use stuff,
Speaker 1: I can only play about ten seconds for you, so
Speaker 1: you may not feel it in this moment, but perhaps
Speaker 1: if you look this up on your own and listen
Speaker 1: to the full thing. However, I gotta say, um, when
Speaker 1: I listened to this track for the first time, UM,
Speaker 1: with this isolated Mary Clayton thing, it kicked in for
Speaker 1: me pretty quickly. So here, let's play a little bit
Speaker 1: of that track right now. So that's the Mary Clayton
Speaker 1: isolated vocal there and powerful. Yeah, absolutely is um. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of ways that people have described this feeling, like, like,
Speaker 1: what are a few of them? Oh? Yeah, So there
Speaker 1: are different terms people of use. Some people call it
Speaker 1: aesthetic chills. Some people say musical chills. Because obviously part
Speaker 1: of the sensation is similar aler to feeling cold, they're
Speaker 1: also somewhat different. There's a a tingling or shivering sensation
Speaker 1: that runs up different parts of the body. Different uh
Speaker 1: studies have looked at feeling this in different parts of
Speaker 1: the body, but it seems to sometimes happen in the limbs,
Speaker 1: like in the arms or legs, or up and down
Speaker 1: the spine. Of course, there is the term free so
Speaker 1: on which we've been using today, and that's from the
Speaker 1: French word meaning shiver. Uh. Some people have used the
Speaker 1: term uh skin orgasm, which that seems uh in some
Speaker 1: ways kind of kind of phenomenologically accurate with some of
Speaker 1: the sensations, but it also brings in a lot of
Speaker 1: baggage that's not that's perhaps confusing. Yeah, and in particular, um,
Speaker 1: because I've also come across that term before, and I
Speaker 1: get it in like a almost like a cute ce
Speaker 1: description kind of way. However, at least in my understanding,
Speaker 1: there's nothing really sexual associated with this phenomenon whatsoever. So
Speaker 1: it does just kind of like add another element that
Speaker 1: doesn't actually exist, at least to my understanding. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: brings in baggage that is not necessary to understand the concept,
Speaker 1: and so it's probably better not to do that one
Speaker 1: if you're trying to ask what is this thing and
Speaker 1: how can we explain it? Right. And then there's one
Speaker 1: other thing we should probably mention, just by way of
Speaker 1: saying that we're not really going to get into this today,
Speaker 1: which is the the concept of a s MR. People
Speaker 1: have asked us to talk about this on the show before.
Speaker 1: I guess we've never really gone into it in depth.
Speaker 1: It seems like this may have some kind of overlap
Speaker 1: with what we're talking about today, or at least share
Speaker 1: some boundaries, but we're just gonna bracket that as as
Speaker 1: a concept that maybe in some ways related, but it's
Speaker 1: different from what we're talking about. Rights Anecdotally, I can
Speaker 1: say for myself, I experience freesan often and strongly, but
Speaker 1: I don't believe I've ever experienced a s MR. So
Speaker 1: I I can't explain that. But you, I completely agree
Speaker 1: with you. It's it's it's uh, could be related, but
Speaker 1: definitely bracketed and separate. Yeah, So, for the rest of
Speaker 1: this episode, we're gonna be focusing on this feeling of
Speaker 1: free so on the subject of the psychophysiological response to music,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna be asking this question of why do
Speaker 1: certain songs, specifically certain moments in songs elicit such a
Speaker 1: strong reaction in the body what does it have to
Speaker 1: do with pleasure and pain and the obscure functioning of
Speaker 1: the reward pathways in our brains? Who gets it? What
Speaker 1: causes it? And why is it pleasurable? Uh? And so yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm really glad you brought the subject up, Seth, because
Speaker 1: I think it's a fascinating puzzle, one that we probably
Speaker 1: can't conclusively answer, but we can raise findings that that
Speaker 1: point us off in a lot of interesting directions. I
Speaker 1: think maybe the listeners will have a lot of fun
Speaker 1: trying to see if they can put this puzzle together
Speaker 1: themselves as well. And I think with those puzzle pieces,
Speaker 1: it does make the experience of experiencing freezon a bit
Speaker 1: more fun when you can perhaps recognize those patterns and
Speaker 1: the music you're listening to and go, oh, perhaps that's
Speaker 1: the reason why I'm feeling this right now, and get
Speaker 1: kind of a repeatable experiment where you can go, oh,
Speaker 1: I've no is that X, Y or Z are what
Speaker 1: cause it? In my own sensations? And then it is.
Speaker 1: But it's a little self experimentational and it's honestly, I
Speaker 1: find it kind of fun. Yeah. Oh oh, It's one
Speaker 1: of the most dangerous and thrilling of states the state
Speaker 1: of being able to partially understand your own mind. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so looking in the phenomenology of of these music thrills
Speaker 1: of of freesan. Unfortunately, this is one of those areas
Speaker 1: where there is a bunch of existing research at this point,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it is focused on related but
Speaker 1: slightly different questions, which is just always a mess to
Speaker 1: wade through. So there be there are different studies out
Speaker 1: there that sort of use different terminology to describe the feelings. Clearly,
Speaker 1: these feelings overlap a lot. Sometimes they include or isolate
Speaker 1: different components of it. Uh. Some call it chills, some
Speaker 1: call it thrills. Some consider goose bumps a necessary part
Speaker 1: of freesan. Some don't only look at goose bumps and
Speaker 1: not these other sensations. So, unfortunately, when we're talking about
Speaker 1: the research going forward, you're just going to have to
Speaker 1: accept and keep in mind that what we're talking about
Speaker 1: here is not a unified phenomenon with a consistent definition
Speaker 1: across all these studies, but sort of a system of
Speaker 1: related phenomena with family resemblances that have been approached from
Speaker 1: a bunch of different angles. But it's clear that they're
Speaker 1: all at least somewhat related. They're all part of this
Speaker 1: intense psycho physiological response to music. So what are the
Speaker 1: actual descriptive characteristics of the Freezon response. Well, I was
Speaker 1: watching a twenty nineteen conference presentation by a researcher working
Speaker 1: in the neuroscience of music. I'm going to refer to
Speaker 1: several times throughout this episode. Her name is Psyche Louis,
Speaker 1: and she lays out some of the most common responses,
Speaker 1: breaking down responses to music into categories of the sort
Speaker 1: of abstract versus the visceral or somatic. Now, in the
Speaker 1: abstract responses to music, you've got general strong emotions, you've
Speaker 1: got the idea of feeling trans ported to another place
Speaker 1: or time. You've got the feeling of all. You've got
Speaker 1: losing your sense of time or where you are, or
Speaker 1: the avocation of memories. But then on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you've got these visceral and somatic responses to music. And
Speaker 1: these are the responses in the body, the ones we're
Speaker 1: focused on today, which are chills, goose bumps, lump in
Speaker 1: the throat, heart racing, crying, uh, feeling in the pit
Speaker 1: of the stomach, and generally the sort of pleasurable appraisal
Speaker 1: of these sensations in the body. Seth, what do you
Speaker 1: think about that list of sensations in the body? Does
Speaker 1: that ring true to you? Yeah? And um, since uh,
Speaker 1: looking into this more recently, I've actually been paying more
Speaker 1: attention to what I personally experience. And I did not
Speaker 1: realize that goose bumps were such a part of my
Speaker 1: own personal frees on experience. But while listening to so
Speaker 1: many frees on inducing tracks over the past few days
Speaker 1: and then actually like looking at my body and being like, oh,
Speaker 1: there they are, you know, there are my goose bumps,
Speaker 1: and um, so yeah, I know. I I fully believe
Speaker 1: that to be true. And UM, here's another thing that
Speaker 1: I believe is going to get a bit anecdotal when
Speaker 1: it comes to who gets free song from music. And
Speaker 1: I apologize for how many times I'm gonna say anecdotal,
Speaker 1: but this is a very anecdotal kind of phenomenon. It's
Speaker 1: it's difficult to really hammer it down. And um, depending
Speaker 1: upon the source. I've looked at a few A lot
Speaker 1: of people say about two thirds of people experience free song,
Speaker 1: but I've seen it as low as fifty five and
Speaker 1: as high as eighties six, So that's a pretty broad
Speaker 1: spectrum for how many people they believe to experience this
Speaker 1: as to the reports of the inconsistency and uh in
Speaker 1: the reported prevalence of free song. You go out and
Speaker 1: survey people say, you know, hey, how many of you, um,
Speaker 1: on average have these chills and goose bumps and all
Speaker 1: these things when you listen to music, You're gonna get
Speaker 1: different answers, probably because the question is being asked in
Speaker 1: a different way a or with different criteria. So this
Speaker 1: is one of the problems with the phenomenon not being
Speaker 1: consistently defined or measured. And plus, self diagnosis is always
Speaker 1: a pretty tricky thing in general too, with something so
Speaker 1: kind of ephemeral, And perhaps that is why some studies
Speaker 1: focused on physical reactions like goose bumps. It's like, you
Speaker 1: can't lie if I see your goose bumps, there they
Speaker 1: are there, they aren't. But I think it's clear that
Speaker 1: like more than half of people have frees on. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that seems to be the case for sure. And UM,
Speaker 1: I can say this so um again. For the podcast
Speaker 1: that I host, Record Store Society, we have a discord channel. Um.
Speaker 1: If people don't know what Discord is it's more or
Speaker 1: less a message board that that people you know go,
Speaker 1: and it's exclusively for people who listen to this podcast
Speaker 1: that I host, and so therefore everyone on there is
Speaker 1: a big old music nerd, Like that's just kind of
Speaker 1: like you wouldn't go there if you weren't. So the
Speaker 1: other day, for Zon got brought up because I actually
Speaker 1: heard this new song um that I really enjoyed called
Speaker 1: Paranoia Party by Francis Forever, and when I heard it,
Speaker 1: I absolutely got tons of for song from it, like, um,
Speaker 1: there's a real nice build, there's a big change from
Speaker 1: like quiet to loud. There's a lot of patterns kind
Speaker 1: of breaking down and then re emerging, a lot of
Speaker 1: these things that perhaps influenced frees On and um, so
Speaker 1: I posted it on the Discord channel for Record Store Society, going,
Speaker 1: oh man, I get big time frees On for this,
Speaker 1: and a couple of people were like, I had to
Speaker 1: google that word, but now that I know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about, me too, And then someone else go like, oh,
Speaker 1: me too, and someone else would say like, me too,
Speaker 1: and I have to say that this is again, here's
Speaker 1: that word. Anecdotal, entirely anecdotal, but like one of the
Speaker 1: people on this message board for extreme music nerds, everybody
Speaker 1: was feeling. It's like there there wasn't anybody who did
Speaker 1: not know what the feeling and sensation of freesan was.
Speaker 1: So it says something about attention and it's that chicken
Speaker 1: or egg thing again. I believe also at least one
Speaker 1: study I was looking at found that people tend to
Speaker 1: find familiar music more likely to cause freesan. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I can. I can definitely see that. In particular with
Speaker 1: that song I was just talking about the first time
Speaker 1: I heard it, certain things would make a hit for me.
Speaker 1: For example, a sudden change in volume, because that's something
Speaker 1: that is going to hit me no matter why. I
Speaker 1: don't need any prior knowledge. Just volume is volume. But
Speaker 1: then the second time I listened to that same song,
Speaker 1: the anticipation that I knew that the volume change was coming,
Speaker 1: that hit me in a different way too, and I
Speaker 1: felt it from the anticipation as well. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I percent believe that as well, that that the a
Speaker 1: familiar song can cause it for reasons other than just
Speaker 1: purely um, what's there. It's not just about anticipatory chills, yes,
Speaker 1: chill chills and feelings of freesan leading up to the
Speaker 1: moment of sort of the peak that you're you're anticipating, right, yes,
Speaker 1: roller coaster, yes, yeah, But I feel like what we
Speaker 1: were just saying would sort of go along with it
Speaker 1: with the study that I was looking at, Seth, I
Speaker 1: think I actually dug this up because you you found
Speaker 1: an article, a popular level article by one of the
Speaker 1: authors of this study. So this was by Mitchell C.
Speaker 1: Culver and Amani L. Lay published in the journal Psychology
Speaker 1: of Music in two sixteen called Getting Aesthetic Chills from
Speaker 1: Music the Connection between Openness to experience and freesan. So
Speaker 1: this is another entry in the the who gets freesan
Speaker 1: from music? Question? So this study compared people's reports of
Speaker 1: their feelings of freesan and music with physiological responses like
Speaker 1: measuring things like skin conductance responses, and a personality typeogy
Speaker 1: test that was based on the five factor model. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're not familiar that the five factor model is
Speaker 1: a way of sort of classifying people's personalities according to
Speaker 1: five different metrics, so you know, you can sort of
Speaker 1: get an idea of many things about a person and
Speaker 1: what kinds of preferences they might have what kinds of
Speaker 1: behaviors they might show if you know their scores on
Speaker 1: five different measures, and these measures would be conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, extroversion,
Speaker 1: and openness. So listeners who experienced free songs tended on
Speaker 1: average to be higher in the trait openness. It's also
Speaker 1: known as openness to experience. I was looking for a good,
Speaker 1: uh succinct definition of openness to experience. This one comes
Speaker 1: from the Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology by McRae in two
Speaker 1: thousand four, and it identifies that the relevant traits of
Speaker 1: openness to experience our tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, need
Speaker 1: for variety, esthetic sensitivity, absorption, unconventionality, intellectual curiosity, and intuition.
Speaker 1: So people who are high in the trade openness tend
Speaker 1: to be more interested in and tend to prefer difference, variety,
Speaker 1: and novelty, whereas people who are lower in trade openness
Speaker 1: tend to prefer what's familiar and traditional. Wow, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: So in a write up feature about this research, one
Speaker 1: of the authors, Mitchell C. Culver, wrote, quote, while previous
Speaker 1: research had connected openness to experience with free san most
Speaker 1: researchers had concluded that listeners were experiencing Freesan as a
Speaker 1: result of a deeply emotional reaction they were having to
Speaker 1: the music. So right, the idea would have been, maybe
Speaker 1: people who are higher and openness to experience are just
Speaker 1: more likely to have deep emotional connections with music. But
Speaker 1: uh Culver goes on to say, in contrast, the results
Speaker 1: of our studies show that it's the cognitive components of
Speaker 1: openness to experience, such as making mental predictions about how
Speaker 1: the music is going to unfold, or engaging in musical imagery,
Speaker 1: which is a way of processing music that combines listening
Speaker 1: with daydreaming, that are associated with frees on to a
Speaker 1: greater degree than the emotional components. In a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of kind of conflicting information that we are receiving and
Speaker 1: kind of like experiencing with this whole thing. That's one
Speaker 1: of the biggest ones to me is that like the
Speaker 1: emotional experience of openness based on the cognitive components of openness,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? Like that that that's that's
Speaker 1: that's a head scratcher, that's that's it makes sense to
Speaker 1: me in a way. But again, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: emotion plus the intellect in a very strange way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly so, So it's possible that their their findings are incorrect.
Speaker 1: But if Culver and Ela Lately are correct, what they're
Speaker 1: saying is that people who are high in the trade
Speaker 1: openness are apps not getting more Fressan experiences because they're
Speaker 1: more emotional, but because they tend to engage in more
Speaker 1: pattern recognition and prediction behavior when listening to music, that
Speaker 1: they're more likely to be engaging with the piece of
Speaker 1: music in a way that seeks out patterns in the
Speaker 1: structure of the song and tries to predict what's coming next,
Speaker 1: and that that activity is more highly associated with these
Speaker 1: extremely powerful psychophysiological experiences, more so than the than the
Speaker 1: emotional components. And I think that's interesting for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and at least in my own experience, I
Speaker 1: can definitely feel that to be true. If I look
Speaker 1: at the songs that give me Fressan patterns and then
Speaker 1: a subversion of a pattern or a almost like doubling
Speaker 1: down on a pattern, like like either way can really
Speaker 1: do it. But but but really am some sort of
Speaker 1: accent upon a pattern whichever path you want to take
Speaker 1: on that this will come back. A major theme in
Speaker 1: the research about the underlying mechanisms of frees on has
Speaker 1: to do with patterns and prediction and UH and anticipation.
Speaker 1: But anyway to move on to other things. So that
Speaker 1: that was that people who are higher in the trade
Speaker 1: openness tend to report more freesans UH. There is another
Speaker 1: There is apparently a social component. I was reading a
Speaker 1: note that a researcher named Alf Gabrielson in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: in a work called Strong Experiences with Music, reported that
Speaker 1: people who listen to music together with a friend or
Speaker 1: partner experience more activation of the autonomic nervous system, which
Speaker 1: is associated with these these reactions in the body. The
Speaker 1: autonomic nervous system is UH is the part of the
Speaker 1: nervous system that controls things that are that are involuntary
Speaker 1: in your body, such as maintaining of course, you know,
Speaker 1: heart rate and digestion and breathing and all that, but
Speaker 1: also homeostatic responses, responses to changes in temperature, and the
Speaker 1: fight or flight response, which is specifically a subset of
Speaker 1: the autonomic nervous system known as the sympathetic nervous system
Speaker 1: and the sympathetic nervous system appears to often be activated
Speaker 1: in these frees on experiences. So something's going on in
Speaker 1: the body where a a musical freesan has something in
Speaker 1: common with the fight or flight response, which is very
Speaker 1: interesting and we'll get more into that later on than now.
Speaker 1: Another way to approach this question of who gets musical
Speaker 1: frees on um is can we learn anything by identifying
Speaker 1: what people have in common when they don't experience musical
Speaker 1: freeson uh. So, again I mentioned earlier that presentation I
Speaker 1: was watching by the researcher Psyche Louis Uh and she
Speaker 1: was talking about studies that have been done with people
Speaker 1: who have what's called musical and hedonia, and this is
Speaker 1: a condition where people just do not really derive pleasure
Speaker 1: from music. Now, it's important to specify what musical and
Speaker 1: hedonia is not. It's different on what's known as a
Speaker 1: musa or tone deafness. People with musical and hedonia do
Speaker 1: not show major errors in their perception of music. They
Speaker 1: can hear it just fine. And it's different from general
Speaker 1: and hedonia. So people with musical and hedonia can derive
Speaker 1: pleasure from other things. It's not a generalized lack of pleasure.
Speaker 1: It's just a lack of pleasure from music. And one
Speaker 1: thing Louis talks about is research that has found that
Speaker 1: people with musical and hadonia have different patterns of connectivity
Speaker 1: between the auditory regions of the brain and a region
Speaker 1: of the brain known as the nucleus incumbents. Uh So,
Speaker 1: the nucleus incumbents is important in the reward system. It
Speaker 1: is used to drive motivation for the anticipation of rewards,
Speaker 1: including things like food, sex, money, and drugs. Basically, like
Speaker 1: anything you can think of that would be, you know,
Speaker 1: a kind of pleasurable stimulus that would really motivate you
Speaker 1: to want to get more of it. That motivation to
Speaker 1: get more of it is mediated by reward system in
Speaker 1: the brain, including the nucleus accumbans. This might be also
Speaker 1: very unscientific for me to say, but all those things
Speaker 1: also seemed to have um elements of um anticipation and dopamine.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, exactly. So the thrill you get in anticipation
Speaker 1: of one of these things, food, sex, money, drugs, any
Speaker 1: of these these things, the thrill you get in the
Speaker 1: brain while you were in pursuit of that goal is
Speaker 1: very much related. That is the reward system working to
Speaker 1: motivate your behavior. Now, another interesting thing about who gets
Speaker 1: musical freesans. I was reading a about a study by
Speaker 1: the Estonian neuroscientist Yak punk Step who found in research
Speaker 1: in nineteen in the journal Music Perception that at least
Speaker 1: in his study, that women reported experiencing chills from music
Speaker 1: somewhat more more often than men did. Though obviously people
Speaker 1: of all genders get the chills, it found that it
Speaker 1: was a little bit more common in women. And also
Speaker 1: there was an interesting observation from punks up study, which
Speaker 1: was this quote, many mistakenly believe that happiness in music
Speaker 1: is more influential in evoking the response than sadness. A
Speaker 1: series of correlational studies analyzing the subjective experience of chills
Speaker 1: in groups of students listening to a variety of musical
Speaker 1: pieces indicated that chills are related to the perceived emotional
Speaker 1: content of various selections, with much stronger relations to perceived
Speaker 1: sadness than happiness. So, according to poccepts research here, sad
Speaker 1: music is more likely to cause free songs in reality,
Speaker 1: But when people are just sort of asked to speculate,
Speaker 1: they tend to believe that happy music causes it more.
Speaker 1: Isn't that fascinating? And it makes me wonder like, could
Speaker 1: this be related to confusion in reflecting on your own
Speaker 1: experiences of free song, because maybe even though it actually
Speaker 1: happens to you more often with negative valenced esthetic content,
Speaker 1: you know, sad music, sad movies, the experience itself is
Speaker 1: somehow pleasurable, so maybe you mistakenly believe it to be
Speaker 1: caused by more positive valenced content in your memory. At
Speaker 1: least I don't know that that's the causal chain there,
Speaker 1: but that that mistake that people make is interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it definitely could be some sort of confirmation bias, um,
Speaker 1: because even now when you said that, I thought to myself, Okay,
Speaker 1: what are all the examples I'm thinking of? They are
Speaker 1: one happy songs? I I I, And I think part
Speaker 1: of it, at least for me, is there's perhaps something
Speaker 1: triumphant in a lot of the songs that creates the
Speaker 1: freesng feeling in me. Um, maybe a bit bombastic. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to apologize that I get tons of free
Speaker 1: song from limb aserab, but you know, when when when
Speaker 1: do you hear the people sing? Comes on? I? I
Speaker 1: get that feeling all over And there is something that
Speaker 1: is triumphant about that song, but there's a there, there's
Speaker 1: a subtlety to it. There, there's an ambiguity to it
Speaker 1: because the song and its lyrical content and even something
Speaker 1: about the way it sounds implies a kind of risk
Speaker 1: or threat. Does that make sense? It does? And and
Speaker 1: and perhaps that kind of duality is just part of
Speaker 1: music in general. Like I was thinking about that Beatles song. Um,
Speaker 1: it's like, I've got to believe it's getting better, It's
Speaker 1: getting better all the time. And then you hear John
Speaker 1: Letton say it couldn't get much worse. Were like, it
Speaker 1: seems like a very positive song unless you pay attention,
Speaker 1: and it's like, oh no, no, this is a very
Speaker 1: sad song that is hopeful. Perhaps and and perhaps that
Speaker 1: that that dichotomy, it's just a part of music in general,
Speaker 1: which which needs to be factored in as well. Huh
Speaker 1: so do you yes for me? Do you hear the
Speaker 1: people sing? It is sort of triumphant sounding, but in
Speaker 1: its lyrical content it is a demonstration of courage in
Speaker 1: the face of near certain death. Right Wow, yeah, fascinating
Speaker 1: fascinating stuff anyway, So ready to move on to maybe
Speaker 1: the next question, which is what triggers free song and music, like,
Speaker 1: what are the specific auditory triggers that bring it about
Speaker 1: most often? Again, this is something where there's probably going
Speaker 1: to be a lot of idiosyncrasy in people's responses, but
Speaker 1: there are certain things that do tend to emerge as
Speaker 1: as like the most common triggers. And here I'm going
Speaker 1: to be referring to I can't remember if I already
Speaker 1: said the name of this paper. I think I didn't,
Speaker 1: But this is a paper that is a a review
Speaker 1: of the of the existing research on frees on as
Speaker 1: often by Luke Harrison and Psyche Louis who already mentioned.
Speaker 1: And it's called Thrills, Chills, freesans and Skin Orgasms Towards
Speaker 1: an Integrative Model of Transcendence Psychophysiological Experiences in Music. And
Speaker 1: this is published in Frontiers in Psychology, and they collect
Speaker 1: some of the existing research on musical freesan inducers. One
Speaker 1: big study that looked into this was slow Boda in
Speaker 1: and this one found that the common types of musical
Speaker 1: phrases that bring people to a state of freesan, we're
Speaker 1: quote chord progressions descending the circle of fifths, to the
Speaker 1: tonic very specific. Uh. Then melodic appoggiaturas. So appoggiaturas are
Speaker 1: when there is a grace note or grace notes added
Speaker 1: to a melody before or between the expected notes. I
Speaker 1: feel like it's kind of hard to explain without singing it.
Speaker 1: I kind of don't want to sing it because that
Speaker 1: would sound pathetic, But I know what you mean. It's
Speaker 1: that quick anticipatory note right before the actual kickoff of
Speaker 1: the chorus or the verse or the bridge or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So if you can imagine a familiar melody, say, imagine
Speaker 1: somebody singing the melody of of London Bridge is falling down,
Speaker 1: but adding in little grace notes in between the familiar
Speaker 1: notes of the melody. Does that make sense? It does
Speaker 1: to me, but does it make sense to our listener?
Speaker 1: But then also the onset of unexpected harmonies, This is
Speaker 1: a huge one for me. A lot of the ones
Speaker 1: that I can think of are when or when harmonies
Speaker 1: come in, when vocal when new vocals are added. Rights,
Speaker 1: yeah uh. And then they also say and melodic or
Speaker 1: harmonic sequences, which seems very unspecific to me. Is I'm
Speaker 1: not sure what to make of that, But they also
Speaker 1: cite another study by Grua at all or Greva at
Speaker 1: all in two thousand seven that found um that the
Speaker 1: onsets of freeson were quote most likely to occur during
Speaker 1: peaks in loudness, moments of modulation, and works in which
Speaker 1: the melody occupied the human vocal register. Uh. And all
Speaker 1: that sounds right to me. A big thing is changes
Speaker 1: in volume, dynamic changes, sudden dynamic leaps where you go
Speaker 1: from UH, where you go from soft to suddenly loud,
Speaker 1: or from loud to suddenly soft. Those have been shown
Speaker 1: to elicit freesan UM. But then also sudden changes in
Speaker 1: say the register when you jump up an octave or
Speaker 1: something like that. And they point out that these uh,
Speaker 1: these triggers tend to point in the direction of freesan
Speaker 1: having something to do with expectance violation. Because almost all
Speaker 1: of the things that have been identified as major triggers
Speaker 1: of free so on are when a song has established
Speaker 1: a pattern and then the pattern suddenly changes in some way.
Speaker 1: That all makes sense. Now, I guess it's time to
Speaker 1: move on to the question of why does this happen?
Speaker 1: This is really the big puzzle, right, So you've got
Speaker 1: something that's just a song it is, you know, music,
Speaker 1: It is vibrating air molecules that are stimulating your ears.
Speaker 1: It's sound that occurs in a certain pattern or or
Speaker 1: or cycle of tones and rhythmic pulses, and somehow that
Speaker 1: means something to you. And it not only means something
Speaker 1: to you, it triggers this powerful response that seems to
Speaker 1: involve uh, the emotions and and pleasure seeking and and
Speaker 1: the full body and and maybe something having to do
Speaker 1: with the autonomic nervous system kind of like a fight
Speaker 1: or flight response would. So it's this big mess that's
Speaker 1: obviously really complicated. So one of the things that I
Speaker 1: thought might be helpful to start by looking at is
Speaker 1: one specific subset of musical free so on, which is
Speaker 1: the experience of goose bumps. So it's actually, I think,
Speaker 1: at root, a fascinating question in itself. Why would human
Speaker 1: beings get goose bumps from esthetic reactions to art and music?
Speaker 1: You know, there's a biological response that it's at least
Speaker 1: at first glance, hard to identify a cause and effect
Speaker 1: relationship for right, Yeah, it doesn't make much sense intellectually. Yeah, Uh,
Speaker 1: so when you get goose bumps, the technical term for
Speaker 1: what's happening here is pilo erection. It's also sometimes known
Speaker 1: as the pilo motor reflex um. And what's going on
Speaker 1: in your body when you get goose bumps is that
Speaker 1: in your skin, at the base of your body hairs,
Speaker 1: there are these little muscles known as erector pilly and
Speaker 1: when these muscles contract, it causes your hairs, which are
Speaker 1: normally relaxed and lying flat, to suddenly stand on end.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like pulls them down tight and they
Speaker 1: stand straight up. And the question would be why does
Speaker 1: the body do this? Well, there are a couple of
Speaker 1: major explanations that are correlated with what normally causes goose
Speaker 1: bumps or similar reactions in animals, especially animals with more
Speaker 1: hair than us. One answer is the cold. When you
Speaker 1: are cold, your body is losing heat through the skin,
Speaker 1: and the pilo erection response is an evolutionary adaptation that
Speaker 1: helps protect the body against heat loss by insulating the skin,
Speaker 1: so your body detects a chill and it protects itself
Speaker 1: by contracting the erector pilly, causing the body hair to
Speaker 1: stand up. This obviously would have been much more useful
Speaker 1: to human ancestors, who had significantly more body hair than
Speaker 1: we do. It does a lot less to help insulate
Speaker 1: our relatively unhaired bodies today, but it seems to be
Speaker 1: a somewhat vestigial trait, like when we get cold, we
Speaker 1: still get the goose bumps, as if we had a
Speaker 1: big coat of fur to help insulate us when when
Speaker 1: our skin did that. But it's not just when we
Speaker 1: get cold. There are also threats of danger. That cause
Speaker 1: is the polo motor response, So the body deploys the
Speaker 1: same reflex, the same pilo erection in response to sudden
Speaker 1: shocks or fear or threats of danger, and the evolutionary
Speaker 1: reasoning is that this provides a survival advantage because pilo
Speaker 1: erection makes the body look bigger. So you've probably seen
Speaker 1: a cat that gets spooked by some kind of possible threat,
Speaker 1: maybe an aggressive dog, or maybe just a cucumber on
Speaker 1: the floor. Whatever, it seems to detect the possibility that
Speaker 1: some other kind of animal is they're threatening it, and
Speaker 1: it's first stands up on end. Now the cat looks thicker, larger,
Speaker 1: it looks more dangerous and able to defend itself, which
Speaker 1: means that this other animal or or pseudo animal is
Speaker 1: less likely to attack and these explanations for the pilo
Speaker 1: motor reflex have been known about for a long time. Actually.
Speaker 1: Charles Darwin wrote about these reactions and goose bumps in
Speaker 1: his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Speaker 1: Animals in eighteen seventy two, where he wrote that quote
Speaker 1: hardly any appressive movement is so general as the involuntary
Speaker 1: erection of the hair's feathers and other dermal appendages. And
Speaker 1: he noted correlates of these in in not just mammals,
Speaker 1: but in mammals and in birds and in reptiles, which
Speaker 1: I thought was interesting. So the evolutionary reasoning connecting goose
Speaker 1: bumps to a survival advantage in the in the case
Speaker 1: of cold or threats makes very solid sense. But why
Speaker 1: would this connect to abstract emotions or to esthetics like music?
Speaker 1: So I was looking around for good explanations of this.
Speaker 1: One thing I came across was an explainer I found
Speaker 1: in Scientific American from two thousand three by a physiologist
Speaker 1: and professor of zoology at the University of Gulf in
Speaker 1: Ontario named George A. Boubinick, who said that basically all
Speaker 1: goose bumps responses involve the release of adrenaline and the
Speaker 1: activation of the autonomic nervous system like we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, and uh Bubinic writes quote. Adrenaline, which in
Speaker 1: humans is produced in two small bean like glands that
Speaker 1: sit sit a the kidneys, not only causes the contraction
Speaker 1: of skin muscles, but also influences many other body reactions.
Speaker 1: In humans, adrenaline is often released when we feel cold
Speaker 1: or afraid, but also if you're under stress and feel
Speaker 1: strong emotions such as anger or excitement. Other signs of
Speaker 1: adrenaline release include tears, sweaty palms, trembling hands, and increase
Speaker 1: in blood pressure, erasing heart, or the feeling of butterflies
Speaker 1: in the stomach. Uh So, that's a little frustrating because
Speaker 1: it establishes the possible mechanism in the endocrin or nervous
Speaker 1: system that may be partially correct for explaining the mechanism
Speaker 1: in these cases. But you're still kind of left wondering why,
Speaker 1: right rights And also, well, it's been brought up before
Speaker 1: this connection to fight or flight, but the why has
Speaker 1: not been explained at all. Uh So, I'll try another
Speaker 1: one here. So this one, I'm not sure how good
Speaker 1: of an explanation this is, but at least I found
Speaker 1: it very interesting. So this is what's known as the
Speaker 1: separation call hypothesis. This is another evolutionary explanation for emotional chills.
Speaker 1: And this one goes back to somebody I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: in the episode, the Estonian neuroscientist Yak punk Sepp, who
Speaker 1: he's known for creating the note the term affective neuroscience,
Speaker 1: the neuroscience of emotions, and uh punk steps hypothesis. I
Speaker 1: found a good summary of it in another paper that
Speaker 1: was by Benetic and Karen Back in Biological Psychology in
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven, so I'm going to read their summary
Speaker 1: of of punk SEPs view. He argues that the separation
Speaker 1: calls of lost young animals used to inform parents about
Speaker 1: the whereabouts of their offspring. These calls might have induced
Speaker 1: internal feelings of coldness and chills, which enhanced the motivation
Speaker 1: for social reunion. A preserved responsivity to certain acoustical features
Speaker 1: e g. Sustained high frequency notes as often presented by
Speaker 1: solo performers, may represent an unconditional component of the chill response.
Speaker 1: This theoretical approach, which could be termed separation call hypothesis,
Speaker 1: thus relates pylo erection to sensations of coldness and sadness.
Speaker 1: Uh So, this is interesting. I'm kind of skeptical that
Speaker 1: this explains everything that's going on, but it does touch
Speaker 1: on multiple features in a way that would make some
Speaker 1: kind of causal sense in an evolutionary perspective. So the
Speaker 1: idea is that, okay, you separate baby rats from their mothers,
Speaker 1: and the baby rats get cold and they squeak at
Speaker 1: a particular frequency that triggers the parent rat to locate
Speaker 1: them quickly, So the process would go. The baby is alone,
Speaker 1: feels temperature decrease, the baby releases a separation call. This
Speaker 1: causes a feeling of separation, a feeling of loss or
Speaker 1: a kind of correlate of sadness in the human context,
Speaker 1: and a feeling of physical coldness, chills, or even goose
Speaker 1: bumps in the mother, motivating rapid reunion and contact with
Speaker 1: the baby rat. So punk Step was arguing that maybe
Speaker 1: these emotional goose bumps we feel in response to music
Speaker 1: have a deep biological root in this mammalian separation call
Speaker 1: and and the response that we would feel in in
Speaker 1: in reaction to hearing it. Perhaps some sort of like
Speaker 1: evolutionary left over kind of a thing. Right, So you
Speaker 1: have certain types of sounds or thought patterns triggering this
Speaker 1: feeling of being moved, which which would simultaneously cause a
Speaker 1: feeling of almost like physical coldness, the chilling feeling goose bumps,
Speaker 1: and a feeling of separation, and a motivation to re
Speaker 1: establish social contact, which in itself would be a a
Speaker 1: sort of a reward motivation where you've got a goal
Speaker 1: now and you're like, I need to get this. I mean, um,
Speaker 1: if true, that's absolutely amazing everything that could come from
Speaker 1: a simple like evolutionary left over instinct. You know, I
Speaker 1: think about the entire music industry coming from just this
Speaker 1: left over a response that has kind of like almost
Speaker 1: um almost pointed usn't the wrong direction, but we got
Speaker 1: so much pleasure out of it anyway. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think this may have something to it, and I've read
Speaker 1: that there were some subsequent studies that kind of lent
Speaker 1: support to at least in some cases. But it also
Speaker 1: seems hard for me to imagine that this is the
Speaker 1: direct route of all emotional chills. Uh. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe this kind of causation is wrapped up in there somewhere,
Speaker 1: but I'm still thinking about other ideas. So one of
Speaker 1: the other ideas comes back to something that we we've
Speaker 1: mentioned a few times now, which is about patterns and predictions. Now,
Speaker 1: earlier I mentioned this conference presentation I watched by Psyche Louis,
Speaker 1: the musical neuroscience researcher. It was at the Brain Mind
Speaker 1: Summit and in might t in twenty nineteen and uh
Speaker 1: and she talks about this hypothesis and in her presentation,
Speaker 1: so she says that a lot of our response to
Speaker 1: music has to do with fulfillments and violations of expectation.
Speaker 1: So you think about what's your what's your actual experience
Speaker 1: of listening to music, What is your brain doing when
Speaker 1: you're paying attention to the music you're listening to. I
Speaker 1: think it's that music establishes patterns. You know, phrases are repeated,
Speaker 1: chord progressions, cycle, and often symmetrical ways. Popular music, of course,
Speaker 1: has the very common verse chorus verse structure. Uh. And
Speaker 1: though there are other types of music, like jazz and
Speaker 1: classical music that are less repetitious and have less to
Speaker 1: do with established patterns, they still do establish some patterns.
Speaker 1: You can feel out the grammar of a classical symphony
Speaker 1: or or a jazz improvisation, even though they might be
Speaker 1: less repetitive than some familiar types of pop and rock music, right,
Speaker 1: Like maybe there's just a theme that repeats, or perhaps
Speaker 1: it just being played in the same key. You go, Oh,
Speaker 1: I can kind of predict where this is going to
Speaker 1: go based simply on like instinctual knowledge of like you know,
Speaker 1: different chord progressions and different different um scales, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. So, yeah, a piece of music has a
Speaker 1: kind of implied grammar or syntax as kind of rules
Speaker 1: that you can learn, and then you use that to
Speaker 1: predict how it's going to develop from the present moment.
Speaker 1: And so she talks about how this feeling of being
Speaker 1: able to predict what's coming next usually is something that
Speaker 1: we find rewarding in the brain, like in the actual
Speaker 1: reward system. Uh, the ability to say, hey, I think
Speaker 1: I know what's going to happen next, and then anticipating
Speaker 1: and then trying to see if your prediction is correct.
Speaker 1: That is a reward motivation process in that part of
Speaker 1: the brain. And this actually comes back to something I
Speaker 1: think we already mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode,
Speaker 1: but the research finding um that people who get chills
Speaker 1: from music versus people who don't get chills from music.
Speaker 1: There are differences in the amount of fiber connecting different
Speaker 1: parts of the brain. In this case, it's the amount
Speaker 1: of white matter connecting regions of the auditory system where
Speaker 1: you would be processed incoming sounds um in the temporal lobe,
Speaker 1: two regions of the frontal lobe that Luis says are
Speaker 1: important for emotion and reward again, specifically the nucleus incumbents
Speaker 1: and the medial prefrontal cortex. And so this comes back
Speaker 1: to the dopaminergic reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that
Speaker 1: I think is sometimes a bit mischaracterized as being synonymous
Speaker 1: with the feeling of pleasure, which is slightly off because
Speaker 1: the dopaminergic reward system is not just responsible for feeling
Speaker 1: good after getting what you want, but for managing the
Speaker 1: salience of incentives, managing your awareness of things in your
Speaker 1: environment that you might want, and your motivation to get them. So,
Speaker 1: dopamine increases in the brain in anticipation of receiving a reward,
Speaker 1: and it plays a role in motivating you to repeat
Speaker 1: a behavior that caused you to get a reward in
Speaker 1: the past. So in our ancestral environment. These rewards would
Speaker 1: be things that provided a survival reproduction advantage, so food, water,
Speaker 1: sexual partners, but also things like parental care. But our
Speaker 1: reward systems can also become motivated by rewards that are
Speaker 1: at a sort of abstract remove, like money, or perhaps
Speaker 1: things like enjoyable art and music, or even by substances
Speaker 1: that stimulate the reward pathways chemically, like opiates or cocaine.
Speaker 1: But from some of the neuroscience research, it looks like
Speaker 1: when we have these intensely pleasurable psycho physiological responses to music,
Speaker 1: something is going on with the reward pathway that has
Speaker 1: to do with predictions that pleasure in music somehow has
Speaker 1: something to do with the listener recognizing patterns and the
Speaker 1: reward seeking mechanisms in the brain being motivated to detect
Speaker 1: and predict those patterns. This makes me want to speculate,
Speaker 1: but I will not. I don't know, go right ahead.
Speaker 1: My My speculation is this, UM, I remember basically reaching
Speaker 1: a certain age where um, you think to yourself, uh, gosh,
Speaker 1: I hate school, schools annoying? Gosh, school what what a drag?
Speaker 1: And then someone wiser will tell you, you know, school
Speaker 1: isn't actually about the lessons. It's not about the homework.
Speaker 1: School is about learning how to learn. It's about learning
Speaker 1: how it to be intellectually curious enough that in the future,
Speaker 1: when you do want to know something, you can teach
Speaker 1: yourself how to know it because you've learned how to learn.
Speaker 1: And in my mind, I'm thinking about how music is
Speaker 1: kind of instilling this desire for pattern recognition, which personally
Speaker 1: I do think benefits life, and I do think benefits
Speaker 1: um oh, problem solving and benefits you know, making a
Speaker 1: grocery list, everything, You know what I mean, Like, patterns
Speaker 1: are extremely useful in our society. So it's it's um
Speaker 1: perhaps it is an evolutionary leftover that makes us enjoy music,
Speaker 1: but perhaps it has stayed with us because it has
Speaker 1: proven to be useful in the regard of like it's
Speaker 1: teaching us, it's improving us, it's making our brains a
Speaker 1: little a little more fits because it's almost like we're
Speaker 1: having a little training session by listening to music, by
Speaker 1: enjoying arts, by enjoying culture, and that makes everything else
Speaker 1: in our lives a little bit better and a little
Speaker 1: bit easier. So, like music is teaching us how to
Speaker 1: learn in a way pure speculation. Well, I definitely think
Speaker 1: there could be something to that, But I would also
Speaker 1: come back at it from the other angle, because it's
Speaker 1: clearly not as simple as music sets up a pattern
Speaker 1: that you can predict, and then when you correctly predict
Speaker 1: the pattern, it's pleasurable because if if music is too predictable,
Speaker 1: it becomes boring. Right, And this goes sort of it,
Speaker 1: at least on the face of it, seemed to go
Speaker 1: against something we were talking about earlier, which is that
Speaker 1: a lot of these peak experiences free sun come precisely
Speaker 1: when patterns are broken or violated. It's not when it's
Speaker 1: the most predictable and you're the easiest to get the
Speaker 1: pattern recognition right. It's when something changes unexpectedly that you
Speaker 1: feel the tingles all over. But at least for me,
Speaker 1: that's the learning aspect of it. Um to to throw
Speaker 1: something in that, perhaps Robert would say, if Robert were here, Um,
Speaker 1: there's a thing with meditation where, um, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're trying to clear your mind and you're trying not
Speaker 1: to think about anything and then you accidentally think about
Speaker 1: a slice of strawberry cheesecake, you know that's bad. In
Speaker 1: the regard that you're trying to think of nothing. However,
Speaker 1: the active energy you take during most kinds of meditation
Speaker 1: to clear your mind again, to go okay, get out
Speaker 1: of my mind, strawberry cheesecake. I'm trying to think about nothing.
Speaker 1: That is akin to like doing a rep. It's like
Speaker 1: a kin to like doing something active to make you better.
Speaker 1: So perhaps the subversion of patterns that we recognize our
Speaker 1: brain does hit the little food pellet switch and go,
Speaker 1: good job, you noticed, you know, aren't you a smart
Speaker 1: little person? Keep up, keep it up. You know you're
Speaker 1: learning here, You're you're you're being um, You're being someone
Speaker 1: trained to understand patterns when they change, and perhaps to
Speaker 1: pay extra attention to when they do change, because that's
Speaker 1: perhaps when life is at its most dangerous, is when
Speaker 1: the when the patterns are subverted, not when the patterns
Speaker 1: are the same. Well, that actually ties into something else
Speaker 1: I came across. So I mentioned earlier that I watched
Speaker 1: that video that was an interview with a music neuroscientists
Speaker 1: named Matt Sachs, and uh Sachs had speculated, now this
Speaker 1: is actually going more back back in a previous uh
Speaker 1: possible explanation that we were talking about for the neurobiological
Speaker 1: mechanisms of pleasure and freees on. But when when you
Speaker 1: go to the idea of the arousal of the autonomic
Speaker 1: nervous system, you know, the fight or flight response, uh,
Speaker 1: and getting goose bumps as a result of a of
Speaker 1: cold or being under threat. Sax is talking about the
Speaker 1: pleasurable response to music in those terms. Maybe getting goose
Speaker 1: bumps is like a threat, and he speculates, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how much research there is to back this up,
Speaker 1: but he speculates and maybe sometimes high pitched notes or
Speaker 1: sudden dynamic changes in music are actually initially reacted to
Speaker 1: by the body as a kind of threat. And it's
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, when you detect a loud sound,
Speaker 1: what does that usually mean? It usually means like there's
Speaker 1: something you need to pay attention to because it's possibly dangerous.
Speaker 1: But then he speculates that after the startling sounds such
Speaker 1: as the dynamic change in the music or the sudden
Speaker 1: high voice or something is rationalized by the prefrontal cortex
Speaker 1: and judged actually safe, that's when the sense of pleasure comes.
Speaker 1: It's in the realization that your your brain has sort
Speaker 1: of been startled into a semi fight or flight response
Speaker 1: by something in the sound, But actually it's just a
Speaker 1: piece of music, And it's like realizing that the threat
Speaker 1: in a horror movie is not actually dangerous. I was
Speaker 1: just thinking the same thing, like like a horror movie,
Speaker 1: like a roller coaster. It's um a safe exploration of
Speaker 1: fear and anticipation is definitely a big part of that.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about any jump scare in a horror film.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, interesting, thank thank But anyway, to come
Speaker 1: back to Harrison and Louis. In their summary of of
Speaker 1: a study from two thousand one by Blood and store Uh,
Speaker 1: they write that these researchers quote showed with pet scanning
Speaker 1: of people under musical free san that patterns may reflect
Speaker 1: a craving reflex similar to that surrounding responses for food, sex,
Speaker 1: and drugs of abuse. It's possible, then, that the reason
Speaker 1: we develop such affinity for free san inducing music is
Speaker 1: that once we experience musical free san, we develop a
Speaker 1: dopaminergic anticipation for its return, effectively becoming slightly addicted to
Speaker 1: the musical stimulus. I mean, that's an analogy I've made
Speaker 1: before when it comes to um seeking out new music
Speaker 1: that it is similar to a drug and being a
Speaker 1: person who is very much a teetotaler in every way,
Speaker 1: I do not want to diminish people's actual addictions to
Speaker 1: real drugs, but following the same patterns. Uh yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: just like, Oh, I I think I can find a
Speaker 1: another album, Like I haven't heard a new album that
Speaker 1: really got me excited lately. I gotta I gotta go
Speaker 1: to go down to the record store. I need to
Speaker 1: go find something else. I gotta go dig through some crates.
Speaker 1: And it's just sort of like that feeling of there's
Speaker 1: something out there, there's something out there that's really good,
Speaker 1: and you haven't heard it yet, so you need to
Speaker 1: go get it. You need to go find it, you
Speaker 1: need to talk to people and uh and those are
Speaker 1: the things you can do on record store society, find
Speaker 1: it wherever you find podcasts. Do do you when you're
Speaker 1: seeking out new music? Do you actually have like the
Speaker 1: these direct pleasurable experiences in mind is like sort of
Speaker 1: the thing you're questing after, Because while I do love
Speaker 1: them in music, I remember when I was more obsessed
Speaker 1: with like finding new music, I had a probably a
Speaker 1: stupider idea in my head, which was like, once I
Speaker 1: hear this album, then finally I'll understand music. Do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? I do? I definitely do. I
Speaker 1: I felt that also, UM where, in particular, if there
Speaker 1: were albums that everyone said, we're truly, truly great, and
Speaker 1: I would go, oh, man, I'm gonna I'm gonna find
Speaker 1: this album. Let's say it's The Velvet Underground Nico, you know,
Speaker 1: the famous one with the Andy Warhol Binna on the cover.
Speaker 1: UM where I'm like, this is that album that everyone
Speaker 1: keeps talking about. One day, I'm gonna find it. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna listen to it, and then I'll know what everyone's
Speaker 1: talking about, and I will have achieved something. It will
Speaker 1: be like a totem somehow that I have found and
Speaker 1: listened to this album. Obviously, this is way before any
Speaker 1: kind of streaming media, so it was much more difficult
Speaker 1: to track down and purchase an album when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. Um. But but in that same regard, I
Speaker 1: would say, to answer your question about seeking it out
Speaker 1: and does that provide some sort of pleasure? I do
Speaker 1: think that for me personally, the things I love most
Speaker 1: in music are um progression change, experimentation, people trying new things.
Speaker 1: I really love really experimental, really you know, for lack
Speaker 1: of a better word, odd music. I really enjoy that.
Speaker 1: And not to say that I don't also enjoy you know,
Speaker 1: some some beatles as well. But um, but that being
Speaker 1: the case, I would not be surprised if deep down,
Speaker 1: subconsciously me perpetually seeking stranger music, seeking the experimental and
Speaker 1: the you know, the the the new, for lack of
Speaker 1: a better word, is perhaps trying to find that thrill again,
Speaker 1: find that that that roller coaster, find that, um that
Speaker 1: that that that that jumps scared from that that scary movie.
Speaker 1: You know. Oh well, this is interesting because this connects
Speaker 1: to something else I was reading. So I was reading
Speaker 1: an interview with a researcher named dr oy In a
Speaker 1: vessel of z Ki, who studies the science of the
Speaker 1: human response to art and aesthetics. That a place called
Speaker 1: the Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and he'd done
Speaker 1: some work on essentially people's frees on reactions not just
Speaker 1: to music, but to other genres of arts, such as poetry,
Speaker 1: because also people can get frees on from poetry, and
Speaker 1: so he did a study on that and one thing
Speaker 1: he noted this was in the context of poetry, but
Speaker 1: I think it's probably also true of music is that
Speaker 1: he found that experienced people need more complexity in order
Speaker 1: to be affected. So basically, the more experience you have
Speaker 1: with a genre of art, usually the weirder you need
Speaker 1: it to be. That makes sense. No I've made this
Speaker 1: analogy myself where people have asked me, oh, why are
Speaker 1: you listening to that noise? Like literally, you know noise.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of noise albums that I very much enjoy,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I think about it like a foodie
Speaker 1: where there's a person out there who, you know, they
Speaker 1: love pasta, and they ate their pasta and it's oh good.
Speaker 1: But at a certain point, after they've really really focused
Speaker 1: and studied and had so much pasta's coming out their ears,
Speaker 1: they're like, you know what, I think, like, I need
Speaker 1: to go to this like gastro Microbiology center where they
Speaker 1: give me like a pasta foam and like a snifter
Speaker 1: of basil liquefied that I inject in my arm. Like
Speaker 1: like I I do think that all art does eventually
Speaker 1: become stranger and stranger, and I think that goes for
Speaker 1: everything I think that goes for shoes, sneaker heads will
Speaker 1: probably do the same thing, same thing with them people
Speaker 1: who are really into cars, people who are really into um,
Speaker 1: I think everything, honestly, I do think all aesthetic appreciation
Speaker 1: eventually gets really strange because you're perhaps getting a little
Speaker 1: bored and you're looking for that new feeling again, right?
Speaker 1: Does that happen with everything? So I wonder about cars,
Speaker 1: like if you if you are somebody who's obsessed with cars,
Speaker 1: you go to all the auto shows and you read
Speaker 1: all the car blogs and all that. Eventually, are you
Speaker 1: like only interested in batmobiles and rocket powered cars and stuff,
Speaker 1: or like, I don't know, I wonder about that. I
Speaker 1: think this will relate again to what we were looking
Speaker 1: at um before, with like the different kinds of brains,
Speaker 1: where there was the one kind of brain. Um that
Speaker 1: this was when you were talking about openness, how one
Speaker 1: was looking for the novel, looking for the new, and
Speaker 1: the other one was looking for the traditional, looking for
Speaker 1: the essential, you know. And I really do feel like,
Speaker 1: perhaps let's let's take a car example. I think neither
Speaker 1: of us are car guys, but we will put ourselves
Speaker 1: in that world. There is someone that goes to know,
Speaker 1: my nineteen sixties Corvette is the perfect car that I
Speaker 1: will love forever. And then there's another person at the
Speaker 1: same car show who's looking at all the like the
Speaker 1: fancy like I don't even know what they're called, but
Speaker 1: like the like the prototype cars that will never actually
Speaker 1: be made but always look really really neat and futuristic,
Speaker 1: and you know, blade Runner esque. Um, they'll only drive
Speaker 1: one of those spike cars from Fury Road. Yes, And
Speaker 1: so I think both exist, and I think both exist
Speaker 1: in also at every form of arts, like there are
Speaker 1: people who are I only listen to classic rock, and
Speaker 1: there are people who are like, no, I need I
Speaker 1: need some chainsaws on ice cubes, you know, through reverb
Speaker 1: chamber sus so I I it's all there, you know,
Speaker 1: some people like Thomas Kincaid, some people like Picasso, and
Speaker 1: I think it's it's all good. It's all good. And
Speaker 1: I think perhaps what you're talking about with the the
Speaker 1: differences between openness and just what brain connectivity does for
Speaker 1: you personally might might help explain that. And Frizon, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you could be right about that. So I
Speaker 1: realized time is running short, but there's one more thing
Speaker 1: I wanted to hit before we wrap up, because I
Speaker 1: think this is interesting as well. Um So I came across,
Speaker 1: like I mentioned, this researcher named Oregon Vessel of is Key.
Speaker 1: He's got a study I was looking at published in
Speaker 1: Social Cognitive and affect of Neuroscience. But I actually found
Speaker 1: what was really interesting was an interview with him done
Speaker 1: by a poetry journal called The Napkin Poetry Review. And
Speaker 1: in this interview, this guy was talking about the constant
Speaker 1: upt of pleasure in negative emotions, which I think is
Speaker 1: something that really does need to be addressed if we're
Speaker 1: talking about uh freesan in in music, because it's so
Speaker 1: often in in songs that are sad or have some
Speaker 1: kind of negative valence. And actually he points out that,
Speaker 1: you know, Aristotle wrote about this apparent paradox, like why
Speaker 1: do people enjoy going to the theater to watch tragic
Speaker 1: plays that are full of pity and fear and anguish?
Speaker 1: Are these emotions not painful when we experience them in
Speaker 1: our lives And the answer is yes, they are. But
Speaker 1: there must be something about experiencing them in the context
Speaker 1: of a play that transforms these negative emotions into something pleasurable.
Speaker 1: That we want to seek out and repeat. And as
Speaker 1: an analogy, you might think, of course, about that sad
Speaker 1: song you can't stop listening to. There's some kind of
Speaker 1: pleasure in the aesthetics of sadness. Um. Now, another way
Speaker 1: of possibly explaining this is that Aristotle wrote also about
Speaker 1: the the complexity of negative emotions them elves, and how
Speaker 1: they often contain pleasurable aspects. So, for example, he wrote
Speaker 1: that anger always has an element of pleasure in it
Speaker 1: because the person who's angry is always at some level
Speaker 1: sort of experiencing a thrill from from the expectation of
Speaker 1: vengeance for you know, the way they've been wronged and uh,
Speaker 1: and obviously you know, there's a lot of media that
Speaker 1: clearly seems geared towards just making people recreationally angry. Sometimes
Speaker 1: people want to get angry about stuff. But you could
Speaker 1: also say that the same could be true about sadness,
Speaker 1: that maybe there is something going on with sadness, that
Speaker 1: maybe sadness can be pleasurable in some ways, if it's
Speaker 1: just say, due to separation of loss, because there's this
Speaker 1: pleasurable anticipation of redemption and reunion, the same way that
Speaker 1: anger could be pleasurable because there's this anticipation of revenge.
Speaker 1: But anyway, for so for for this researcher of Vasalowski,
Speaker 1: he said that this ended up making him want to
Speaker 1: study that the concept of being moved moved, which is
Speaker 1: something that's clearly not just like pleasurable or painful. It
Speaker 1: is this intense emotional state that can blend positive and
Speaker 1: negative emotions into a single episode. It's it's pleasure and
Speaker 1: pain indivisible, actually um and that he u. He added
Speaker 1: a hypothesis onto this concept of being moved, which has
Speaker 1: been explored by by philosophers for centuries, which is that
Speaker 1: it seems like peaque moments of being moved, having this ambiguous,
Speaker 1: complex emotional episode where you're experiencing both maybe joy and
Speaker 1: sadness at the same time. Those experiences tend to be
Speaker 1: marked by emotional chills or goose bumps. Yet again, and
Speaker 1: so he did some research looking into this in people's
Speaker 1: responses to poetry and uh and in talking about possible
Speaker 1: reasons why people why we might have this reaction, he says,
Speaker 1: you know, it could be that it's it's conceptually when
Speaker 1: something feels important and at stake, you know, when when
Speaker 1: it feels like that the autonomic nervous system is aroused
Speaker 1: and causes this goose bumps reaction, uh that is presented
Speaker 1: to the conscious brain as a sort of signal that's
Speaker 1: something that's going on in the art that you're listening.
Speaker 1: You know, the music you're listening to or the poem
Speaker 1: you're reading, something important seems to be up for grabs,
Speaker 1: and that you need to be on alert and remember
Speaker 1: what's happening. Makes sense. And this comes back to you know,
Speaker 1: I can think of a lot of the things that
Speaker 1: give me goose bumps in art that are somewhat positive,
Speaker 1: but they also, like I was saying earlier with lie Miserab,
Speaker 1: they involves some element of like risk or change, maybe
Speaker 1: displays of courage or new possibilities, which are themselves often
Speaker 1: very very kind of scary. So coming back to what
Speaker 1: Vassal of Whisky says in this interview, he says, you
Speaker 1: have the negative emotion on the foreground and this antidote
Speaker 1: in the background, or vice versa. But there's always this clash.
Speaker 1: You can't really decide on if it's now positive or negative,
Speaker 1: So it's somehow both and this creates a lot of tension.
Speaker 1: But importantly, we can experience this clash from an aesthetic
Speaker 1: distance mode. So it's something about the the ambiguity of
Speaker 1: these uh, these you know, stimuli that elicit a combination
Speaker 1: of of pleasure and pain, of joy and sadness at
Speaker 1: the same time that caused this feeling of being moved.
Speaker 1: Something about the the high stakes that seem to be
Speaker 1: suggested by these by these complex emotional states, maybe stimulate
Speaker 1: the autonomic nervous system because it's making your body in
Speaker 1: some conceptual sense, feel threatened, as if there was like
Speaker 1: a bearer menacing you, and it's trying to get your
Speaker 1: attention to do something about this, this concept that's being raised.
Speaker 1: But then again, as with what we talked about before,
Speaker 1: maybe it's possible that you realize you can trigger this
Speaker 1: response with some kind of aesthetic stimulus like music or poetry.
Speaker 1: And then once you realize you can trigger it, the
Speaker 1: reward system in the brain just wants to get it
Speaker 1: again and says, well, let's try that again and again,
Speaker 1: and and that's what motivates perhaps the play measurable kind
Speaker 1: of feeling there, it's the grasping after it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we've answered some quell I'm not gonna say we've
Speaker 1: answered some questions, but like you said, we we've identified
Speaker 1: some puzzle pieces, we've laid them out on the table,
Speaker 1: and we've taken a good look at them. What seems
Speaker 1: most compelling to you now that we've talked about all this.
Speaker 1: I do think that Frison seems to me to be
Speaker 1: an evolutionary leftover that is tied to the fight or
Speaker 1: flight response, and that perhaps our brains have misinterpreted it
Speaker 1: into something that has made us enjoy art in many ways,
Speaker 1: but in particular music, which doesn't make a lot of sense. However,
Speaker 1: that's what it's it's adding up to in my mind.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and this could this is a this is
Speaker 1: a deep, deep situation that we've we've kind of dug
Speaker 1: ourselves into, and I'm not sure if we'll be able
Speaker 1: to get out all right. Well, the next thing is
Speaker 1: everybody's gotta go listen to Record Store Society. What's a
Speaker 1: what's a good episode for people to start off with?
Speaker 1: Is something you've done recently? You think people should look up? Well,
Speaker 1: if they specifically want to hear you and Robert, they
Speaker 1: got to check out let's see. I think that's episode
Speaker 1: seventeen and that episode is called Video Dream and that's
Speaker 1: the one where we do a deep dive into a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of our favorite music videos. Um, let's see
Speaker 1: there's a lot of other really good ones. Oh man. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a really great one called EP or Not EP.
Speaker 1: That's episode nineteen where that's there's a music journalist and
Speaker 1: author Matt Lamay. He was one of the uh like
Speaker 1: the like original like a Pitchfork writers back in the day. Um,
Speaker 1: and that's a really fun conversation. We've got a really
Speaker 1: great episode coming out this Friday, but I I suppose
Speaker 1: yeah it's tomorrow. I can, I can stay here tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I've got this really great musician named m Sage. He's
Speaker 1: one of my favorites. And um, we're discussing music document
Speaker 1: trees and that's a very fun deep well so uh
Speaker 1: because I'm I'm stage. In addition to being a wonderful musician,
Speaker 1: also happens to be a film professor in Chicago at
Speaker 1: a university. So uh, he he's got a really great
Speaker 1: um dual knowledge that really music documentaries are the perfect
Speaker 1: subject to have him talk about. So he's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. So anyway, Uh, there's always something fun going
Speaker 1: on every episode's good. But but those are a few alright, folks. Well,
Speaker 1: if that catches your fancy, you should go check out
Speaker 1: Seth's podcast, Record Store Society. Uh. In the meantime, I'll
Speaker 1: see do we have anything else? Now? I guess that
Speaker 1: wraps it up for today. But um, but yeah, if
Speaker 1: you want to find any more of your of our podcasts,
Speaker 1: we are stuff to blow your mind. You can find
Speaker 1: us wherever you get your podcast. We're on all the platforms,
Speaker 1: all the stuff like that, or you can just google us.
Speaker 1: Of course, Please, as always hit subscribe if you're not
Speaker 1: subscribe so you can get all of the episodes we
Speaker 1: put out in the future. Big thanks as always to
Speaker 1: Seth who is our wonderful producer, produces every episode of
Speaker 1: this show and does it does such a great job. Seth,
Speaker 1: we love you and well I really appreciate you coming
Speaker 1: on the show today. Very happy to do it. And
Speaker 1: Robert will be back next time. That's right, yes, so
Speaker 1: Robert will be back on the show in the next episode.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, if you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us to give us feedback on this episode
Speaker 1: or any other to suggest topic for the future, just
Speaker 1: to say hello. You can email us at contact at
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