Radiolab
What your body knows that your brain doesn’t … yet.
6,335 words · 8 speakers
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Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab.
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Hey, it's Lulu. Going to kick off today with a little ghost story for you. So there's this woman, and she's going through weight loss surgery. And when she gets home, she starts hearing these gurgles and creaks and realizes she is being stalked by the former bits of herself, her flesh that she has cut away. Or there is a house that is maze-like and haunted by quiet cruelties that occur between you and your partner, and it feels like there is no way out. These are some of the stories
of the prize-winning writer Carmen Maria Machado. Some of them are true, some of them are fiction. All of them are charged with this sense of spookiness.
I have spent hours of my life being pleasantly spooked by her. And so I was totally delighted when she wrote into our show wondering about something that had happened with her partner of four years, Lauren Brown.
You're rolling?
Yes.
That spooked her.
Should I, should I say?
You can say.
Um, the first time Lauren and I hooked up with each other, I noticed goosebumps on her body right before she like had an orgasm. But the pattern was really unusual. Like, it wasn't just universal goosebumps. It was these kind of like leopard spot goosebumps. Sometimes I'll like touch Lauren on the arm and like she'll get goosebumps, like where I've touched her.
So it's like you leave a trace?
Radio Lab reporter Maria Paz Gutierrez.
Yeah.
Wow.
And editor Soren Wheeler, who sat in with Carmen and Lauren to hear the tale.
Sometimes you have, you call them crispy ones, which is like, they're really, really, really pointy.
Extra crispy is like, I say that you could like grate Parmesan or like zest a lemon on me. Like, they just are like so intense and feel really like sharp.
Right. So like, as soon as we started seeing each other, I think I was just like really paying attention. Like, I was just like, I've never seen this. And I, this has never happened to me. Like, I mean, you have goosebumps like all day, like in some form or another.
Yeah, I'm pretty consistently getting them.
And what stuck out to Carmen wasn't just how often Lauren was getting goosebumps, but it seemed like they would prickle up in response to almost contradictory things.
You know, watching a sports highlight and music.
But then also like sometimes it's like moments that are like sad or like it doesn't actually like the same emotion every time.
And so it was just sort of in my head. And then I was like even more closely watching Lauren and being like, what is this?
Sometimes I think about it and I'm like, if I was a different kind of person, I would be like, I'm haunted.
So Carmen started researching goosebumps and writing about them. She's now years deep into a novel with a title that comes from an old fashioned word for them.
The holy shiver.
The holy shiver? I like that.
It's a term that's been used by scientists to describe the kind of goosebumps a prey animal gets when it realizes it's being watched by a predator, but also that the predator gets just before it goes in for the kill.
Like, it's arousal that connects things like sex and fear and pleasure and excitement. And so, thinking about that, like, it was just sort of in my head. And then I was like, what is actually happening in your brain that's moving from like, for whatever the reason is, like, it's moving from this, like, sort of some kind of neurological impulse into your body? And why?
And then I was like, surely Radiolab has done an episode on goosebumps that feels like a very Radiolab thing to do.
But it turns out, we have not.
And so, yeah, so here we are.
So today on Radiolab, we right this wrong and bring you an episode all about...
Chardonnay or frisson in Spanish calofrio.
Goosebumps. Sometimes they're called a skin orgasm.
I've heard someone say god bumps.
We head out on a journey to find out, why do we get them in these more mysterious situations? And what, if anything, are they trying to tell us?
We're not necessarily aware, but actually, they're kind of magical.
Some answers, some chills, and some honestly incredibly sci-fi sounding scientific experimentation coming your way.
Pause, Sorin. Take us away.
Uh, okay.
Okay. So.
Reporting journey, journey, off on a journey.
Right, right, right.
Hi.
Hi. So our first stop, thank you so much for being here with us.
I'm so excited.
Was science writer Bonnie Soi.
Bonnie Soi, I'm a journalist. I have written a lot about activity, like movement, like your body moving, what that actually does to your brain. And I've actually-
We called Bonnie up because she actually wrote this book. It's called On Muscle, and it's sort of like this journey through all the muscles of your body.
Your biceps, your butt, your heart and blood vessels, and your gut.
And she told us that after writing this book, she became obsessed with this one particular muscle.
Erector peely.
Erector peely. So erectus tereus and peely hair.
They're the muscle that give us our goosebumps.
That would not, that was not what I would have expected. Like, you spend all this time writing a book about muscles.
Yeah, there's so many muscles out there.
I know, I know. So many sexy muscles, so many very obvious muscles, and big muscles. And I, of course, went for the smallest and the weirdest.
And I-
Why?
I think the erector peely give us so much information, right, about how we're doing and feeling. And I love that. I love that it's muscle as existential state.
Hmm.
But backing up a little bit.
Okay, so just to quickly explain the history of this muscle. Around 200 million years ago or so, mammals evolved from reptiles. In the process, they evolved hair, or, you know, fur. And then, around the same time, mammals evolved-
This little muscle fiber.
Little tiny muscle. It's attached to the base of every hair follicle underneath a skin. That little muscle's default is to kind of just chill.
Yeah, exactly. You can kind of think about it being relaxed against your skin.
Unless-
The brain is registering, like, something dangerous?
That animal feels a threat. Let's say that animal's hit with, like, a sudden cold wind, or-
Predators.
It catches a predator or a competitor right at the corner of its eye. In that moment.
The brain triggers this automatic response.
It would send this immediate unconscious signal to all the different hair follicles all across the body. And then.
And then all those tiny muscles contract, you know, causing your hair to stand on end, giving you that goosebump appearance.
Now, that could be a really useful thing because raised hair traps air next to the skin.
So there's like a layer of warm air that's insulating.
Keeping animals just a little bit warmer. Or it was also just useful if they were about to get into a fight.
You know, if you have a cat, you see like when your cat gets agitated, like the hair goes up, like boop, like, you know, I'm bigger, I'm, you know, I'm dangerous.
But for us humans.
You know, this response is kind of a stigial because we don't have that much hair anymore.
Not very useful.
Or most of us don't have that much hair anymore. So, uh, it's not gonna really, it's not really effective.
And so we end up with little bumps on our mostly hairless skin. But the really weird thing is that.
As we have evolved as a species.
We humans started using this automatic survival reflex for things that seem to have nothing to do with our survival.
So music, right? A swelling music or like a really emotional scene in a movie or like big places like the ocean or the Grand Canyon or the edge of a cliff, right? And for us as humans, again, it's like less about the cold and less about the fear and more about the way we experience the world.
But, I mean, I'm still working in my head to connect these different categories of things, like, like, or the, or the goosebumps that used to just make hair stand up for thermal reasons and the goosebumps that used to make hair stand up for physical appearance reasons now suddenly standing up.
For some, or is there one reason behind it all?
I think, I mean, I hear what you're saying.
Right? How is this hair standing up for cold and fear now giving us this emotional component? But I think that, to me, it is intelligence, it is like body intelligence, that I'm like paying attention. I think it's about my body and my mind kind of coming together to try to figure out like what it is that I am feeling in that moment. What is it? I don't know what it is, but I'm paying attention.
Which, you know, it sort of made sense to us, like that the body is trying to tell us to pay attention, but it, it just left us with this question, like, what exactly is the body trying to tell us to pay attention to? We'll get to that right after this short break.
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Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lulu, Radiolab, goosebumps. We are back with reporter Maria Paz Gutierrez, who has gotten a little stuck trying to figure out what exactly is going on with these special kinds of goosebumps that humans get that have nothing to do with being cold or afraid. But then, lucky for us.
He's rolling. Okay.
We ran into a couple scientists. Hello.
Hello. Good morning.
Who have been studying this very particular kind of goosebumps, which scientists call aesthetic chills.
You know, shivers of psychological origins.
God bumps?
Yeah, god bumps.
So anyway, these two guys.
I can go first, yeah. Hi.
Are Nico.
I'm Nico Righensi. I'm currently the Research Director at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies.
Ooh, okay. And his partner in crime.
Hi, I'm Felix. I'm a senior research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies.
Neuroscientist Felix Scholler.
So, why goosebumps?
So me, when I started my PhD.
Felix says, back when he was starting out in grad school.
I needed a problem to work on.
He'd been told that when it comes to these aesthetic chills.
Nobody really knows what they are and why they occur. And I thought that would be a good problem to work on.
So his first step was to try to figure out exactly what triggers these kinds of chills.
First, I started asking everybody what gives you chills and building sort of this database of chill stimuli.
And he found things that a lot of us would expect.
Giant sport games in the stadium.
People talk about being in the crowd when some impossible comeback happened. Totally.
Religion is a big thing.
Personal religious revelations. Sudden acts of kindness from a stranger. That always gives me chills. Yeah, totally.
Very meaningful conversations with people on topics that you care deeply about.
Or even these like particular moments where you're experiencing music or poetry.
Arts in general, but also science. A lot of physicists report that they experience chills when they discover a concept that allows them to make sense of a wide range of experiences.
It's like the intellectual version of the holy shiver. Like someone coming upon the prey of their idea and then, phew! Like they're about to get it, you know? Yeah, kinda. I mean, you know, after like years of doing this research, talking to a lot of people.
Reading a lot of books and documenting moments where.
Felix says he landed on a theory.
It's when you sort of touch the limits of your knowledge. So I guess another way to think about chills is the limits of cognition.
Oh, I love.
That like the limits of cognition like cannot compute. Wow.
Yeah, but the key is Felix says is when the thing that you cannot compute is a deeply held belief.
The basic idea is that we all walk around carrying these very broad generalizations about how the world works. Anything from what goes up must come down to the world is a dangerous place, or humans are fundamentally good, or money equals power. We rely on these beliefs to help us navigate the world. And Felix says that when we run across some experience or feeling that challenges one of those deeply held beliefs.
That's when we get the chills.
Oh.
Yeah, so when I was exposed to some of Felix's work, it kind of clicked that it's like, oh, wow, chills may very well be what it feels like to update your meaning-making process on such a large scale.
Now, at the time, this was just an idea.
An idea in Nico's brain and I.
So I started thinking, OK.
How do we operationalize that idea and try to get empirical data so that we can do science?
So they decided what they needed to do was get people in a lab. So they could give them chills.
Induce it.
Mm hmm. Induce it.
But doesn't it feel like that's uninducible? Like, it's such a private spiritual thing.
Not on the internet.
So. What does that mean?
Felix created this algorithm.
That can span through YouTube networks and look at millions of videos and analyze all of the comments.
Oh, I'm so sad right now. OK, keep going.
Specifically, they were looking for.
When people mention chills, shivers, goosebumps.
So they gather up all these videos. There are these like very famous speeches from very famous people like Mr. Rogers, Carl Sagan's, the pale blue dot speech. Some of them are just straight up life coach inspirational talks and footage of whales breaching, stuff like that. And one that just completely I did not expect was.
Commercials from Thailand.
Whatever their Madison Avenue crew is, has the finger on the pulse of chills.
Seems like it.
OK, wait, I have seen one of these, I think, and it's about this guy who like helps all these strangers. And it totally worked. It totally gave me chills. It's a very good commercial. What that probably means is that you've been walking around with this belief that people suck and that they're not generous or kind. So that's, that's great. I mean, it's a pretty direct hit on your worldview. But, but they also said that a lot of these videos
were just like straight up music.
A lot of choral music.
Especially these moments where...
The soprano singer suddenly takes over the entire orchestra.
There is something like out of reach, you know, beyond, in that sound. Yeah, so they gather up all these videos from online and they actually brought people into their lab and had them watch these videos so they could like see like which ones make the skin actually prickle. And they actually told us there's like one video that was like the number one trigger.
"Alleluia" by Leonard Cohen, sung by...
Rufus Wainwright with a large collection of people.
That is sort of singing along.
You know, this stimulus, for example, will give chills to 75 people out of 100.
Huh. Anyway, at the end of all this, Nico and Felix...
We were able to identify 300 stimuli that reliably induced chills in hundreds of people.
Oh, my God. So then they started showing people these videos in their lab.
3,000 participants in Southern California.
With one extra little step in there.
Before we show them the stimulus, we asked them a range of questions, personality questions, demographics questions.
What are they?
All right, so please rate the following in terms of how much you agree or disagree with each statement. It is important to take care of people who are vulnerable.
And in particular, they were asking questions that sort of like helped them zero in on some of those deeply held beliefs we just talked about.
Some people think I'm selfish and egotistical.
What types of schemas are you running around with?
I often notice people who need help.
Are you seeing everybody as connected ones or as independent?
Sometimes.
Players and you know, you need to get to the top.
I'm not as dependable or reliable as I should be.
And based on how you answer these questions.
I find humor in almost everything.
Nico and Felix can figure out what gives you chills. Oh, interesting. So like you, oh, well, you answered yes to this. So the cross out the sports one, but ooh, that hallelujah chorus. Yeah. So now they're making like the survey helps them create like a bespoke chills, induced chills. Playlist, yes.
And I can predict with a 73.5% accuracy which of the stimulus is the best one for you to look at right now so that I can give you chills in my laboratory and study it under controlled conditions.
And with their little bespoke chills machine, Nico and Felix have done a bunch of different studies. One of the coolest things for me was like they actually hooked people up to this like EEG machine so they could watch their brains while they get the chills.
And the moments when you have chills are almost indistinguishable from a psychedelic experience.
Wait, what? The way they described it, it's like the level of complexity and disorder in the brain signals look like someone who's tripping.
Okay, that, I mean, that really makes neurologically good on their limits of cognition thing. Like they are watching a brain just go haywire. Yeah. You know, maybe some other people would have been like, okay. We sort of figure this out. Job well done, but Felix and Nico were not done. Okay. Because one of the things that Nico and Felix had heard about was that it wasn't just like you understood something or something changed inside you and then you got the chills. But rather that the chills came first. Like, the chills were this signal to the rest of your brain and body to notice something.
A lot of physicists actually talk about how chills was instrumental in helping them understand the importance of some of the work that they were doing.
So not so much I understand it and then get chills, but you seem to be saying that like, oh, the chills helped me know that I had understood something.
It's almost as though when you do get chills, it's this moment of calibration and orientation.
So then they thought, well, if we can give people the chills, maybe we can use that to sort of hack the brain. Reverse engineer someone into this moment where they're ready to rethink the way they think about the world.
We have a funky term for this. We call it schema surgery.
Oh, that, that sounds like something out of a dystopian novel.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of terrorist recruitment videos leverage chills as this way of like showing this recognition of shared humanity and martyrdom for it. So this like full ego dissolution, that is a really dark underbelly of some of this, right? Because it's so motivational. The behavioral activation that emerges after chills is really potent, but dystopian aspects aside, right?
But fortunately for us, what Felix and Nico are trying to do is use chills.
As a novel form of treatment for major depressive disorder.
To help people with depression. Because when, what? Because if you think about people who are depressed, like, they're usually stuck in their worldview. You know, they have these, what Nico called, or Felix called, these maladaptive beliefs, right? Like, I'm alone in the world, or I am bad.
So negative self beliefs, negative beliefs about others, and then negative beliefs about the world in general. Like, the world is a dangerous place. You never know what's gonna happen.
Totally, just these calcified certainties.
And what we've been doing is trying to use the chill stimuli that we've identified to try and
open up people's minds,
then gather evidence that will go against these dysfunctional beliefs, so that they basically expand the scope of their perception.
This is early, early research, and they're trying to figure out a bunch of different things. But one of the studies that I thought was interesting focused on this one particular element of depression called anhedonia.
And anhedonia, right? Anhedonic, like, they lack this ability to kind of feel pleasure, and that impacts their sensitivity to reward.
So let's say you ask them...
Hey, I have $5 in this hand and $20 in this hand. Pick one, right? People with anhedonia, they're indifferent.
They'd be like, "I don't care. I really just don't care."
They'll choose the $5 and $20 with kind of equal likelihood.
Huh. And this, they said, is one of the main characteristics of treatment-resistant depression.
For a simple reason, it's like, these are patients that are no longer motivated to take the necessary actions to get back to the business of life.
So Felix and Nico, they take these people, one by one, into a little room, sit them in front of a computer screen, have them take the survey.
Yep.
And then they're given
their internet content to watch.
They have some moment where their bodies going
and after this experience, they put them through that reward task again. Now, what do you think? $5 or $20?
They behave as if they were normal controls.
They're like, I want my $20.
Yes, give me my 20 bucks.
And, you know, a great majority of the participants that, you know, even just experienced one chill, but even more so if you experienced three chills. These people go on to then not even be able to qualify for the study in the first place. Right? So it's like a clinically significant amelioration of some of their symptoms.
Okay, can I, let me unprickle my skin.
Because I am feeling this. I am like, oh my God, like you get the chills and your certainty melts. And then you can jump through this window to change your life and get your depression in remission. But then I'm also like, come on, no. You see, watch a couple of videos a week of whales breaching and choruses singing. And then you're like, you could feel better from things that like full on meds and CBT therapy or whatever won't help.
I mean, yeah, it is early work. They're still doing these studies. But like in most cases with depression, I imagine it's probably the right combination of a bunch of different things. Although, one of the things they do in one of these studies is like after people get the chills, like they ask them, what did you think about when you were experiencing the chills? They'll sort of ask them about their goals, like the things they they want to do or achieve. And it does look like people after these chills, at least for a moment or a while or whatever. Are sort of a little bit more motivated to just like get up or out
or do something, just engage with the world. That to me feels like sort of part of the mix of things that keep you alive.
Something makes me think like that this kind of chills is your, you know, it's maybe just as important as conserving warmth or looking bigger. Like it's pointing you, almost like a compass toward toward where you need to go, what you need to engage with.
Mm hmm. So in the midst of all of this, turns out Nico and Felix's experiment where they give people chills, they actually have more recently turned this into like an app.
Huh.
I thought I should go and try this. I want to see if you can actually give me chills.
All right. And so what happened?
So I came into the studio. All right, here we are. Here we are, my friends. And I opened the website. First question about you, what is your name? I took their little survey of questions. Would you describe yourself as someone who gets easily moved or touched? Not that very often. And then. Okay, based on your answers, we've chosen. It served me this song. De Ushaya ala Kyaka Gustavo Santa. It's a song from a movie called Motorcycle Diaries. I've actually heard this song before. Which coincidentally I had watched like two weeks before. And I was like, this is mid. When I watched the movie.
So to be honest, I wasn't feeling very optimistic about getting the chills. But then I was like, okay, I'm gonna actually sit with it and I hit play.
It has this kind of like tinge of sadness.
And longing and
then there's this part where this kind of like, almost like a flute like instrument comes in.
It almost sounds like a bird.
And in that moment.
I felt the goosebumps on my skin. I feel it in my, um,
legs, making their way up to my arms.
And then I was just like looking at my arm and yeah, they're nice and bumpy. That's so nice.
And it happened again, I got like another wave and I had just never had the experience of just like being like hit like, like woo, woo, woo.
What, do you remember at all what you were thinking about?
I think in that moment, I was thinking about a trip that I took to Chile. And it reminded me of this day where I was, I think I was doing some kind of like,
kind of like field recording of some musician playing a harp. And like in the street and, and it was just like, reminded me of that version of myself. Like I used to just travel alone all the time, different places, all over Latin America. But like as you get older, like you're just not as crazy as you used to be. And it's uncomfortable. Um, and I think that for me, it's so much of, uh, reading the news creates this like illusion that like, the world is like a really dangerous place. But I've been to these places, a lot of these places that like are quote unquote dangerous.
And even on just like a random street corner, there's so much beauty. And I also just have felt really safe.
So in, in that moment with like the prickled skin, the waves, was it sort of like, those memories are in you and those places might be out there?
Mm hmm.
And.
Go.
Just, just go.
Yeah, go, go back out there. Just go. And so regardless of how we label these goosebumps or exactly what triggers them, it does feel like if you do take the time to notice these moments, give your brain the space to catch up with your body, which is clearly saying something. I think there's value in that. It might just loosen you up and maybe even get you out the door in a slightly different way.
Yeah, just like that alone, don't, don't just let them pass you by.
Anyway, I, I think there is one more thing that's worth saying about goosebumps. Hello. Hi.
We have now learned many different.
I'm sure. I can't wait to hear. I'm so excited. But yeah. It's something that actually came up when we called Lauren and Carmen back to tell them about all the things we'd learned.
There's a little, a bunch of little muscles underneath our skin.
About the cold fear, survival reflex.
And then in that moment, they stand up.
Got it. And, uh, and about Nico and Felix's work on aesthetic chills.
Or whatever you answer these questions and then they can deliver you the content that will get you to have the goosebumps.
Oh, my God.
And of course about how these goosebumps are sort of the unconscious brain and the body's way of telling you that something important is going on that's like worth pausing and thinking about. Where you're like catching up to your body, basically. Yeah.
Yeah, that, that makes sense to me too, even like thinking about moments where I find myself just like completely covered in goosebumps. My whole body feels it.
Yeah, it's almost like your body is like tapping on your brain and being like, hello. But I feel like for me, it's like this place where it's like. But then Carmen told us that even though she doesn't get the goosebumps all that often, she does now find herself thinking about what Lauren's goosebumps are saying, not just to Lauren, but to her. Or like, I was assuming when you saw like Alyssa Luke, I'm sure you had them then.
Oh, my, yes.
Yes. I was out of town and Lauren was texting me like, you have to watch it.
I am getting like patchy goosebumps right now. I have them on my legs and I have some on my arms.
Okay, so quick context, Alyssa Leo was.
A star figure skater when she was very young several years ago. And at sort of the height of her game, under all this pressure to win, she just straight up quit. She took some time off and a couple of years later, she came back to participate in the Winter Olympics.
She said, I don't need a medal. I just need to be here and show people what I can do. But what she doesn't know, if she does that, probably means a medal.
And when you see her, she's clearly there on her own terms.
She straight up kills it. Like she gives a nearly perfect performance.
Once again, triple left, double axel, double.
She looks so relaxed, so genuinely happy.
Even the announcers are blown away.
She stays so loose and completely.
The crowd is going wild.
That's the secret every athlete wants to solve.
And when she finishes.
She got off the ice and she was like, that's what I'm fucking talking about.
I was like, I love, I know this feeling. I recognize that feeling. I love that feeling where I've been like, I did it. I mean, I watched it and I had like full, even now I like full body chills talking about it. And so I feel like, I do, I literally do, I know, oh my God.
She had texted me, I think the next day after everything had happened and was like, I'm just watching clips of Alyssa Liu in the airport and like crying. And I'm like, yeah, I was doing that last night.
Yeah, like I get to like, it's like this sort of shared experience, right? And it like deepens my understanding of who Lauren is. Like people are the same to me as like God, because it's like this, it's actually fundamentally unknowable thing. But with Laura, it's like, I can get as physically close as is humanly possible.
Yeah, even if it's not rational, I, I just feel a little bit more known in that way, I think.
Maria Paz Gutierrez.
Thank you, MPG.
Special thanks to Rachel Gross, Gregory Repick, and to Carmen and Lauren, who set us off on this whole journey. Carmen Maria Machado is currently hard at work on her novel all about The Holy Shiver. But in the meantime, she's got a new book coming out in fall of 2027. It's called A Brief and Fearful Star. You can also find a link to Bonnie Tsui's beautiful book on muscle on our website. It is not just about muscle. It's also a message in a bottle to her dad. If you want to see Alisa Leo's gold-winning routine, or the Thai commercial, or performance of Hallelujah we mentioned, there are links on our website. This episode was reported and produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, with help from Sindhu Naimasambandam, mixing help from Jeremy Blum, and fact-checking by Angeli Mercado.
Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sorin Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Blum, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naimasambandam, Matt Keelty, Mona Mordgauker, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help
from Gabby Santis and Maya Appleby Millamud. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angeli Mercado, and Sophie Semai.
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