Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music | Hacker News Reader

Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music

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76 pointscoloneltcb32 comments

I get chills from music here and there. The piece that most reliably will produce the strongest effect on me is "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Looking at the article there seems to be a genetic component, but no one in my family has ever mentioned them, I should go ask.

We are not a "musical" family. No one plays competently any instruments or goes to concerts. I have an ukulele that I use mostly as a noisy version of a fidget spinner.

From the article I see that the openmindedness trait fits, at least musically: I sometimes go on YouTube musical late night binges and they can easily range from Renaissance guitar pieces to KPop via Mozart, Slipknot or some obscure Latvian folklore.

Here is a wonderful recording of "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" played in Gloucester Cathedral:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihx5LCF1yJY&list=RDihx5LCF1y...

You should listen to Classic FM. You can switch it on at random and this tune is often playing. If it isn't, then it's usually Saint Saens' Organ Symphony finale (as featured in "Babe".) :)

I non-ironically got them chills just by hearing a few bars while checking your link.

I tend to go for this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIhZbvlCjY0 because although I can´t read music I can kind of vibe-read the score by looking at the waves of notes following the music. For me it adds to the experience.

Also the almost organ-like effects of the two separate orchestras seem stronger in this recording than in any other I've tried.

Beautiful, within the first 3 seconds for me too, incredible

My wife just said she wasn't getting any chills, but definitely some yawns :)

It makes me dream of traveling between planets using wormholes for some reason

Thank you for sharing the track: I got chills within the first few seconds... could it be a matter of the high-harmonic frequencies of the strings, and the crescendo combined with the spacious reverb of the place where the music is performed?

I'm going to chime in with some more examples of (for me) chills inducing classical music pieces:

- Mozarts Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor (very dark)

- Rossinis Barber of Seville Overture

- Mozarts "The Magic Flute" Overture (helps if you know the opera)

- Mozarts Symphony No. 39 in E, as soon as the allegro starts

- Schuberts Symphony No. 8 "Unfinished", the whole thing makes me want to burst with excitement

Frequent music chills were an unexpected side effect of my meditation practice. It matches with their "openness to experience" conclusion.

I also found out that you can encourage chills with meditative techniques:

1. Play your song, for example Sogno di Volare.

2. Close your eyes.

3. Think about awesome things: how cool it is that humans invented airplanes and rockets and satelites.

Scientific studies grasping for explanations to spiritual things always give me a smile. This is the way. It’s about opening up to the energetic experience being conveyed through the medium (art, music, whatever). Has nothing to do with individual variations in biology or physiology.

> scientific studies grasping for explanations to spiritual things always give me a smile.

There are no "spiritual" things. Everything we experience is based upon biology and chemistry. Where do you think the "chills" come from if not synaptic firing?

There are only "spiritual" "things". Where do you think "biology", "chemistry" and "synapses" come from?

They were created by magic Gaia energy spirit beings, obviously. Or God, if that is your desired flavor. Or the beings in control of the simulation we're living in.

They are the result of an infinite and ever expanding cosmos; absolutely no magic thinking or beliefs are required. I don't need to pretend that magic exists just because processes are complex.

What I'm getting at is the difference between subjective experience ("chills") and any theory describing it. ("Qualia", "no amount of simulating water will make anything wet", etc.)

Although personally I prefer scientific theories to describe reality (they are still the best/most useful), our experience is never "based" on theories.

Well then we agree. I'm just not a fan of using the term "spiritual" for a physical event. No need to ascribe "chills" in a hand-wavy manner.

Why does the term “spiritual” bother you so much? Perhaps interrogate that.

I don't really have to interrogate why the term "spiritual" has absolutely no meaning wrt the genetic underpinnings of the effects discussed in the study. The study was scientific. It isn't complicated.

IMO, if we had enough brain scans paired with descriptions of subjective experience, we could create a decent bridge between objective and subjective.

I didn't know Sogno di Volare. It does work very well, quite intense.

I got me thinking... I've never taken any mind altering drugs, so I wonder how the experience compares. I guess that even if not in the same league, being "free" and without apparent side effects this is quite the "feelgood" bang for the buck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson

Looks like the statistical geneticists have jumped the shark with this one. This big problem here is that their endpoint (chills) is poorly defined, reported by subjects (and thus highly subjective), and not measured using any type of validated instrument. So I question whether they might be fitting a model to noise here.

In the land of drug development patient reported outcomes, even when captured with meticulously designed instruments in prospectively designed clinical trails, are notorious for being noisy and confounded by the placebo effect.

I pretty much figure from the title it's self reported and yep: "We gather self-reports from a genotyped sample of thousands of partly related individuals from the Netherland".

And the author summary goes on to state: "Many people experience chills when listening to music, reading poetry, or viewing art. Yet not everyone feels these reactions in the same way.". So the subjects aren't even self reporting the same thing.

> In the land of drug development [...]

Fine, but this is the land of genome-wide association studies. I am unaware of any overlap, considering that such 'GWAS' studies require tens or hundreds of thousands of participants to get any definitive signal... Such work is the nature of statistical genetics.

> So I question whether they might be fitting a model to noise here.

On what basis?

I had a similar experience in my genetics class in grad school- the professor explained that children of musicians were more likely to have perfect pitch, hence it was a genetic trait. Some folks suggested that perhaps it was possible that children of musicians were subjected to lots of labelled and unlabelled training data (musical notes) making it "environment" rather than genetic.

i'd like to see the list of media they used to create the chills :-)

You'll have to content yourself with those listed in HN comments.

For the nerds, I'll add the scene from the movie Excalibur when Percival, near the end, throws the Excalibur to the lady of the Lake—with the score playing loudly…

The charge of the Rohirrim in Return of the King also works for me

Doc Severinsen can get me almost every time too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42TgFgVTIIA

Yes, for me it's the scene with the knights riding through the forest with Carmina Burana playing (this was one of my introductions to recorded music- my parents had that record and I spent a lot of time listening to it later).

I think some people call this effect "frisson" and to me it's not dissimilar from the senstation I get from ASMR.

Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor consistently does it for me (https://youtu.be/8V41D0Uczf0). I stopped and stared the first time I heard it (thanks Wednesday Addams!), and learning that it is a reflection on the humanity-altering changes of WW1 makes it more emotional than just another ASMR tingle (which I also sometimes get, as does my daughter).

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