Any human being has experienced this, the music is so touching that it goes under your skin, tickles your spine, and suddenly your have goose bumps… the same bumpy things you get when you are cold or really scared.
It’s true for any kind of strong emotion actually, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, that controls tons of automatic stuff (heart beat, body temperature, sweating,…) is involved in the process, it sends messages to tiny muscles at the base of each one of your hairs, they contract and you get this hair erection… if biologists have come up with some reason in the case of fear (a hair-erected cat become bigger in an attempt to scare away the enemy) or cold (hair trapped air and becomes an insulation against cold)… why do we get goose bumps in the case of music?
Have you noticed that these goose bumps appear when the music is moving, melancholic, nostalgic, it is not really happening when you listen to happy music, which still trigger an emotion, a happy one. Goose bumps mostly occur when we have sad emotions, however, some people may prove this wrong. May be it is mostly correlated to sad emotions because they are the strongest ones?
A study done at McGill University found that listening to goose bumps-inducing music increases the production of chemical dopamine in the brain by as much as 21%,… yes the same chemical whose production is triggered by food or drugs. This is visible on brain scans, and ‘as chills grow in intensity, bloodflow increases between areas of the brain associated with euphoria-inducing vices like food, sex, and drugs.’
But it isn't certainly the case for all types of music, many music leave me indifferent and people will react differently to a certain kind of music, why do we get this goose bumps response in specific cases?
Researchers have established that people already familiar with the music are more likely to get a chill at key moments of the music. And it makes sense, if you already know the music, you anticipate the parts that you really like, and the reward system of your brain is activated even before you hear the part. It exactly works like the drug addict seeing the syringe before the injection of heroin.
But it is probably neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp who came up with the most curious explanation. He studied this phenomenon and observed that goose bumps occur when music evokes painful experiences like the loss of a loved one, and so he suggested that this may have to do with chemicals released in the brain to cop with these sad episodes. He made the parallel with ancient mechanisms, useful to keep social cohesion: for example the cry of a lost baby may have triggered the same response in the mother’s brain, forcing her to find the baby
As a matter of fact, Panksepp was able to produce goose bumps in adult humans when they listened to recordings of their infants’ cries, and music may well be doing the same, mimicking the cry of our loved ones.
So think about it, this epidermal reaction may well just be due to an ancestral adaptation. Just as goose bumps have become useless in case of cold – because we have not enough hair to make any kind of insulation! – they have become evolutionary leftover of our past. The chill that some music give us may not make us find this lost parent or child, but the goose bumps phenomenon sure occurs when there is a strong emotional connection with music.