Musical Frisson with Seth of Record Store Society

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome do Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. I'm Joe McCormick, and my regular co host,
Robert Lamb is not with us today. He is out
on vacation, but as a special treat I am being

(00:23):
joined by our in house audio sorcerer, Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Say Hi, Seth. Hello, everyone, it's me Seth. How are
you doing today? I'm doing great, happy to be on
this side of the microphone, happy to help out well
wall Robert's out of town, and I'm very happy, um
with the subject matter that you chose today, So I'm
looking forward to this right We're so we're doing a

(00:44):
musical themed episode today. Um, because Seth, you host another podcast,
do you want to tell listeners who are not familiar
with the Record Store Society what it's all about? Surely? Um? Yeah.
So obviously the main chunk of my time I spend
producing this show Stuff to Blow Your Mind, But I
also do a weekly show with that I host with
my co host Tara Davies, and it's called Record Store Society,

(01:06):
and um, basically it's a podcast for music nerds by
music nerds and it's um full blown, just a talk
show where people can just share recommendations things we've been
listening to lately, what we love, play some music based
games that you can't really play with other people because
you're going very specific and very nerdy about your music tastes.

(01:27):
But we pretend we're in a record store the whole time.
That's the gimmick. That's the fun little gimmick where we
just uh uh yeah, there's we have sound effects and
all of our guests are customers and me and my
co host are the employees of the record store and
uh yeah, it's fun. It's called Record Store Society and
you can find it wherever you find your podcasts. It's
a great show, folks. I personally recommended. In fact, Rob

(01:49):
and I did a guest episode where we appeared on
Record Store Society one time. How long ago is that
now is a couple of months ago where we ended
up talking Yeah it was music videos. Yes, it was
a great one and um yeah, tons of fun everyone.
If if anyone's in the mood for music talk, if
you're looking for new music recommendations, or you just feel
kind of lonely that you don't none of your friends will,

(02:11):
you know, go on a deep dive about, you know,
bootleg Neil Young albums. Then you know, you can listen
to Record Store Society and we'll we'll scratch that itch.
Speaking of bootleg Neil Young albums, you ever see that
video where he's like going around in record stores and
he's finding bootlegs and he's like taking them without paying. Yes,

(02:31):
I mean you love it. You know, there's something about
a musical curmudgeon that always makes me very happy. And
he's a good one. He's a very good musical curmudgeon. Yeah, yeah,
it's great. He like takes it up. He's like, I'm
on this record and I don't know what this is. Um.
But so anyway, because Seth of the Record Store Society
is joining us today, we thought we would talk about

(02:52):
a musical topic, and I think we've got a really
interesting one that ties up with neuroscience, big puzzles about
how our brains were, emotions, the reward system in the brain,
music and aesthetics and fear and uh and the autonomic
nervous system and all that, and so what we're talking
about today is those moments when music is not just

(03:14):
fun or interesting or intellectually pleasurable, But when musical pleasure
sort of grabs you at the level of the body,
when it sends a shiver down your spine, or when
it causes tingling on your skin or even feeling like
it's under your skin, or when it raises goose bumps
on your forearms or on your neck, or when it

(03:34):
puts a lump in your throat. Today, we're going to
be talking about what is sometimes called free san or
frisson uh in the words of one review. We're going
to be looking at today it is a transcendent, psycho
physiological moment of musical experience. It's the it's the moment
where music grabs you by the body and not just

(03:55):
the mind. Now, Sath, you actually suggested this topic when
we were batting around ideas about what to do today.
Do you remember how this came to your mind? What's
the story here? Um? It's a concept I very much. Um,
I've done mild research into into the past. I'm a
person who feels fressan or however we're going to pronounce
how do you think you're going to pronounce it today? Joe, Well, dang,

(04:18):
I've already been thinking so I've been saying in my head,
free song comes from the French. It comes from a
French word meaning shiver, shiver isn't now and like he
gave me a shiver. But but I've seen plenty of
people also call it frissan so or frost san. So
we're probably gonna jump around, but I'll try to be
as annoying as possible about it. But I'll try to

(04:39):
go with freesan as well. Um, yeah, yeah, and um,
aesthetic chills is the is my favorite definition of freesan,
and um, it's something I experience a lot. And as
a big music fan, I've often thought, am I a
big music fan because I acutely feel freesan very often?

(04:59):
Or do I experience free song often? Because I'm such
a big music fan and I spend so much of
my time listening to and thinking about it and diving
deep and spending all my money on records and blah
blah blah. Like it's a chicken or the egg situation,
which I don't think we can ever have an answer to,
but it's an interesting idea and um, I've also not

(05:20):
too long ago learned that, of course, not everyone experiences it,
which is another very strange aspect when you feel something
that you enjoy, like just like whether it be you know, um,
the taste of something sour and you go, oh, other
people don't taste sour, and you would go, wait a minute,
I thought everyone had this, And that's that's kind of
what I felt when I learned that freesng isn't something

(05:42):
that everyone experiences. And anyway, you you're so good at
researching things, I thought you would uh answer some questions
for me, so i'm I'm I'm ecstatic with with what
you've looked into already. Well, I don't think we're gonna
have full closure on all of the causes of this
of this phenomenon today, but we can raise some questions

(06:03):
and bring up some findings that point off an interesting directions.
This is one of those that I think is still
somewhat of a puzzle, But there are a lot of
pieces of it that are on the table now and
you can arrange them around in different ways and get
some ideas of what to do. But maybe it would
be good to start describing really strong examples that unfortunately
necessarily I think these are going to have to be

(06:25):
subjective that we will talk about examples that affect us personally.
But one thing you'll find is that, you know, some
musical passages are especially prone to eliciting free so on
in many people. But there's nothing that's universal, So what
gets you might not get somebody else, and vice versa. Um.
But I, I specifically have a memory from when I

(06:45):
was in college of I guess a couple of days,
or maybe it was even a stretch of a week
where I was just listening to one song over and
over again. I would like, maybe multiple times a day,
put on my head owns, turned the volume way up,
and just listen to the same song over and over
again with my head bent down and my eyes closed.

(07:07):
It was a song by bay Rout that is called
non Taste, and it has this moment where you know,
it starts off kind of quiet, and then suddenly it
becomes loud. The rest of the band comes in, the
rhythm kicks in uh, and there's a there's clicking percussion
and tonight, And when that happens, I would just feel

(07:37):
these waves of tingling and goose bumps, and I would
do it over and over again, almost like I was
addicted to it. It sort of colors my memory of
my experiences of you know, that summer two thousand whatever
it was. Uh. And another thing is I was thinking,
I still really love music, but I don't really do
things like that anymore. I would sometimes do that with songs,

(07:57):
especially when I was in high school and college. Gen.
It makes me kind of wonder if age might be
a factor in in how often and how intensely you
experience freesan, or in how motivated you are to have
the experience again and again. How does that line up
with your experience? It does, However, I would say that
I don't believe mine has waned at all, and I'm

(08:20):
not really sure. I can't explain that either. I can't
explain why, um something that Like when I was in
like middle school and high school, I was always the
kid with the largest CD collection. I had like the
giant binder full of CDs and it was the only
thing I cared about and blah blah blah. And you
know that at that time when music obsession is very

(08:41):
very common. I think most people feel music obsession during
those teenage through high school. I guess it's all teenage years.
I often had people tell me, oh, when I was
your age, I love music too, You'll grow out of it.
I heard that again and again and again, and here
I am knocking on middle age, and I haven't really
changed too much, and I just kind of became a

(09:03):
different kind of music fan, I guess, which is now
why I host that music show too, and have hosted
other music podcasts in my life. And that's why I
run a record label, It's why I'm a musician. It's
it's all these things that I do and really enjoy.
So yes, I I fully agree with you that there
is this thing that it must be something like a
dopamine release. And we'll get more into like the specific

(09:24):
details about what's happening chemically and all that kind of
stuff later, But no, I I think I still feel
it pretty acutely. I think I still, um do obsess
over songs far too much and talk about music far
too much and go into all those things. And um,
here's another thing that I'm not sure if we'll get
to later. You and I are also both musicians in

(09:46):
our own ways. You know, we are people who write,
record and play music. Um, extremely amateur on my part,
but yes, but that's still something that not a lot
of people do. And I wonder if being a musician
and has something to do with this as well, something
that has to do with that wire in your brain,
that that self serving dopamine plunger, that that being a

(10:08):
rats with a test and hitting the little buttons you
can get your little food pellets. I can't answer these questions,
but that's something that makes me think of sometimes when
I'm playing something over and over and over again, whether
I'm listening to it or with my hand I'm playing
on a musical instrument, I think about that rats getting
a food pellet. Like you're listening to that Bay Roots song,
you know, it's just like and one more please, and

(10:30):
one more please. I don't know. I was trying to
think of other songs that I mean, I know there
there are tons that are just not coming to mind.
But I was making a list while we were getting
ready to record this of moments and songs that I
know regularly, cause Free Song for Me one is another
one I was thinking of. Is the pre chorus in
the song Alex Chilton by the Replacements. Do you know

(10:50):
the part I'm talking about where the the verse transitions
to suddenly the background harmonies come in coinciding with the
lines of the lyrics Children by the Millions sing for
Alex chill right on that part. Yes, always does it

(11:12):
for me. UM. I was also thinking about There is
a there's an awesome soul song called into Something Can't
Shake Loose by ov Right where I experienced free sonic
multiple points in the song, but especially as the intro
has these chord changes on the piano along with uh
sort of plaintive vocals uh cycling through the same lyrics,

(11:36):
but with with these chord changes leading up to when
the rhythm kicks in and the strings come in Never
Never will Game, second Loo No, and uh yeah, chills

(11:58):
all over from it. I mean, I I think if
you experience this, they are definitely UM high points that
you can always remember. Like of off top of my head,
there are always a couple of really strong examples UM,
and perhaps some of these examples that we're listing we'll
be able to actually somewhat dissect and understand why these

(12:18):
examples hold so strong for us. UM. There's a song
called Modern World by Wolf Parade where basically the entire
second half of the song is this building extended chorus.

(12:38):
We're just like you know, it's a it's repetitive, but
maybe like every bar to another instrument is added, another
element is added, and then like you're you're I literally
feel chills thinking about it right now because I can
hear those notes in my head and there's something to
do with pattern that really really brings you home an

(12:59):
X affectation. Um. There's there's also this really great song
UM by Animal Collective called Banshee Beat that's very slow,
very very very um. It's a it's a languid song,
you know, very stretched out, and then every once in
a while, the lead singer A V. Tear just hits
these notes where he says swimming pool and it's like

(13:30):
it erupts out of him like a volcano would erupt lava.
And it's though those moments as well, they're there there there,
I mean, And I also do think that, like you
were saying before, it's very subjective. UM. For example, when
I was talking about this with my wife Lizzie last
night and she showed me a Loofer Yanya song and
I was like, oh, yeah, I know that song, and

(13:52):
she's like, that's the one for me, that's the one
that gives me the chills. And I'm like, not a
great song, but I've never felt it for that and
so so I think you are correct where it is.
Just it's a subjective feeling built into us individually, and
sometimes it's shared, but I think quite often it's not.
I think it's very personal most of the time. Yeah,

(14:12):
it's an interesting phenomenon that seems to involve both cognitive
and emotional elements. Like it's cognitive in that uh sort
of sort of knowledge and context matters, and like it
it matters how much attention you're paying to the music.
Like music that's on in the background is usually unlikely
to cause frees on. I don't know if you have
the same experience. It's especially when you're really listening actively

(14:34):
that it happens, especially at higher volume. UM. But the
other thing is that it sometimes it gets the better
of you, or at least in my experience, I can
get frees on from songs that, um that I don't
want to be unkind, but that I might regard as
sort of like blatantly manipulative or what some people might

(14:55):
call hack songwriting. You know, I don't like to just
like crap all over music, but like, there there are
songs that, uh that I like, but like, I acknowledge
that they're very cheesy. You know, they're not necessarily they
don't convey emotional maturity, and yet they still can cause
this intense reaction when I was thinking of is uh.
In fact, there's several songs, probably by Jim Steinman, that

(15:16):
do this for me. Who he hits It seems like
he hits all of the bars. I was thinking about
the song Nowhere Fast from the movie Streets of Fire,
which is intensely cheesy Jim Steinman pop songwriting, but like
on the pre chorus, when you know the high voices
come in, it jumps up an octave and it's really loud,

(15:48):
and I get the shivers and and I I, um,
I've definitely experienced the same thing, and that line between
cheesy and emotional and what your body is actually taking
in as opposed to perhaps what your brain thinks differently
of it, Like there's like an intellectual and an emotional
place where it hits you. And sometimes I'm not even

(16:10):
sure if this is true. Um, there's a feeling of
embarrassment almost for the performer. And then you think to yourself,
are these chills that I'm feeling part of free san
or are these chills, perhaps some sort of like almost
like a cringe thing. And I think it's usually free song.
I don't think it's usually embarrassment. But they're they're they're

(16:33):
not too good for Jim Steinman exactly, but I do
think they are like somehow, perhaps like neighbors in a way.
And I think there is something about emotional poll compared
with intellectual poll, and them working in tandem can create
this emotion becaucause at the end of the day, a

(16:53):
lot of music is just math. It's a lot of patterns,
it's a lot of um time signature errs, it's a
lot of you know, hitting things at the correct time.
And so in addition to that, there's that's the intellectual side,
and then there's the performance aspect, which brings an emotional side,
and that can I am going down a rabbit hole here,

(17:15):
but I think you understand what I'm saying. Oh yeah, yeah, totally. UM.
One last example for people to think about, maybe before
we move on to UH, to dissecting the concept a
little bit more, is UH. This is one example. I
came across by way of a researcher named Matt Sachs.
So I was watching an interview with him that I
found on the internet. And uh and he mentioned that

(17:36):
in demonstrating musical free song in his lectures, he used
an isolated track of the background vocals from the song
Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones, and those background vocals
are sung by a singer named Mary Clayton. And when
you when you, when I hear them in the song,
I mean, I love Gimme Shelter. It's classic rock song

(17:57):
and it's great, but the song itself does not give
me chills. However, the isolated background vocals by Mary Clayton
absolutely give me chills, it all up and down the body.
Uh And and I think that's interesting too, that you
could actually heighten the effect in some cases by removing
other elements and isolating just one part of a song.

(18:18):
Uh And Sax has actually said in this interview, I
was watching that, um something like nine percent of people
say that this one example gives them chills. It seems
to be like a sort of home run example to use.
Let's try it on our audience for a second. Now
we're gonna give you the caveat here that because of
legal fair use stuff, I can only play about ten

(18:38):
seconds for you. So you may not feel it in
this moment, but perhaps if you look this up on
your own and listen to the full thing. However, I
gotta say, um, when I listened to this track for
the first time with this isolated Mary Clayton thing, it
kicked in for me pretty quickly. So here, let's play
a little bit of that track right now. So that's

(19:08):
the Mary Clayton isolated vocal there and powerful. Yeah, absolutely
is um. There's a lot of ways that people have
described this feeling, like, like, what are a few of them? Oh? Yeah,
So there are different terms people of use. Some people
call it aesthetic chills. Some people say musical chills. Because

(19:29):
obviously part of the sensation is similar to feeling cold,
they're also somewhat different. There's a a tingling or shivering
sensation that runs up different parts of the body. Different
uh studies have looked at feeling this in different parts
of the body, but it seems to sometimes happen in
the limbs, like in the arms or legs or up
and down the spine. Of course, there is the term

(19:50):
free so on which we've been using today, and that's
from the French word meaning shiver. Uh. Some people have
used the term uh skin orgasm, which that's simes uh
in some ways kind of kind of phenomenologically accurate with
some of the sensations, but it also brings in a
lot of baggage that's not that's perhaps confusing. Yeah, and

(20:13):
in particular, um, because I have also come across that
term before, and I get it in like a almost
like a cut ce description kind of way. However, at
least in my understanding, there's nothing really sexual associated with
this phenomenon whatsoever. So it does just kind of like
add another element that doesn't actually exist, at least to

(20:34):
my understanding. Yeah, it brings in baggage that is not
necessary to understand the concept, and so it's probably better
not to do that one if you're trying to ask
what is this thing and how can we explain it? Right?
And then there's one other thing we should probably mention
just by way of saying that we're not really going
to get into this today, which is the the concept
of a s MR. People have asked us to talk
about this on the show before. I guess we've never

(20:55):
really gone into it in depth. It seems like this
may have some kind of overlap with what we're talking
about today, or at least share some boundaries, but we're
just gonna bracket that as as a concept that maybe
in some ways related, but it's different from what we're
talking about. Rights. Anecdotally, I can say for myself, I
experience freesan often and strongly, but I don't believe I've

(21:18):
ever experienced a s MR. So I I can't explain that.
But you, I completely agree with you. It's it's it's
uh could be related, but definitely bracketed and separate. Yeah.
So for the rest of this episode, we're gonna be
focusing on this feeling of frees on the subject of
the psycho physiological response to music, and we're gonna be
asking this question of why do certain songs, specifically certain

(21:40):
moments in songs elicit such a strong reaction in the body.
What does it have to do with pleasure and pain
and the obscure functioning of the reward pathways and our brains?
Who gets it, what causes it? And why is it pleasurable? Uh?
And it's so Yeah, I'm really glad you brought the
subject up, Seth, because I think it's a fascinating puzzle,
one that we probably can't conclusively answer, but we can

(22:02):
raise findings that that point us off in a lot
of interesting directions. I think maybe the listeners will have
a lot of fun trying to see if they can
put this puzzle together themselves as well. And I think
with those puzzle pieces, it does make the experience of
experiencing freezon a bit more fun when you can perhaps
recognize those patterns in the music you're listening to and go, oh,

(22:23):
perhaps that's the reason why I'm feeling this right now,
and get kind of a repeatable experiment where you can go, oh,
I've noticed that X, Y or Z are what cause
it in my own sensations, and then it is. But
it's a little self experimentational and it's honestly, I find
it kind of fun. Yeah. Ohh. It's one of the
most dangerous and thrilling of states, the state of being

(22:46):
able to partially understand your own mind. Yes, okay, so
looking in the phenomenology of of these music thrills of freeesan. Unfortunately,
this is one of those areas where there is a
bunch of existing research at this point, but a lot
of it is focused on related but slightly different questions,

(23:08):
which is just always a mess to wade through, so
there will be there are different studies out there that
sort of use different terminology to describe the feelings. Clearly,
these feelings overlap a lot. Sometimes they include or isolate
different components of it. Uh. Some call it chills, some
call it thrills. Some consider goose bumps a necessary part

(23:29):
of freeesan, some don't. Some only look at goose bumps
and not these other sensations. So, unfortunately, when we're talking
about the research going forward, you're just going to have
to accept and keep in mind that what we're talking
about here is not a unified phenomenon with a consistent
definition across all these studies, but sort of a a
system of related phenomena with family resemblances that have been

(23:52):
approached from a bunch of different angles. But it's clear
that they're all at least somewhat related. They're all part
of this intense psychophysiological response to music. So what are
the actual descriptive characteristics of the freezon response. Well, I
was watching a twenty nineteen conference presentation by a researcher
working in the neuroscience of music. I'm going to refer
to several times throughout this episode, her name is Psyche Louis,

(24:15):
and she lays out some of the most common responses,
breaking down responses to music into categories of the sort
of abstract versus the visceral or somatic. Now, in the
abstract responses to music, you've got general strong emotions, You've
got the idea of feeling transported to another place or time.
You've got the feeling of all. You've got losing your

(24:36):
sense of time or where you are, or the avocation
of memories. But then on the other hand, you've got
these visceral and somatic responses to music. And these are
the responses in the body, the ones we're focused on today,
which are chills, goose bumps, lump in the throat, heart racing, crying, uh,
feeling in the pit of the stomach, and generally the

(24:59):
sort of pleasure bowl. Appraisal of these sensations in the body, Seth,
what do you think about the list of sensations in
the body? Does that ring true to you? Yeah? And um.
Since uh, looking into this more recently, I've actually been
paying more attention to what I personally experience, and I

(25:19):
did not realize that goose bumps were such a part
of my own personal frees on experience, but while listening
to so many frees on inducing tracks over the past
few days and then actually like looking at my body
and being like, oh, there they are, you know, there
there are my goose bumps, and UM, so yeah, I know,
I fully believe that to be true. And UM, here's

(25:41):
another thing that I believe is going to get a
bit anecdotal when it comes to who gets frees on
from music. And I apologize for how many times I'm
gonna say anecdotal, but this is a very anecdotal kind
of phenomenon. It's it's difficult to really hammer it down,
and um, depending upon the source. I've looked at a
few A lot of people say about two thirds of

(26:03):
people experience free song, but I've seen it as low
as fifty five and as high as eighties six. So
that's a pretty broad spectrum for how many people they
believe to experience this. As to the reports of the
the inconsistency and uh in the reported prevalence of frees on,
you go out and survey people say, you know, hey,
how many of you, um, on average, have these chills

(26:23):
and goose bumps and all these things? When you listen
to music, you're gonna get different answers, probably because the
question is being asked in a different way or with
different criteria. So this is one of the problems with
the phenomenon not being consistently defined or measured. And plus,
self diagnosis is always a pretty tricky thing in general too,
with something so kind of ephemeral, And perhaps that is

(26:45):
why some studies focused on physical reactions like goose bumps.
It's like, you can't lie if I see your goose bumps.
There they are and there they aren't. Yeah, but I
think it's clear that like more than half of people
have frees on Yeah, yeah, that that seems to be
the case for sure. And um, I can say this
so um again, for the podcast that I host, Record

(27:08):
Store Society, we have a discord channel. Um, if people
don't know what discord is, it's more or less a
message board that that people you know, go and it's
exclusively for people who listen to this podcast that I host.
And so therefore everyone on there is a big old
music nerd. Like that's just kind of like you wouldn't
go there if you weren't. So the other day, for
Zon got brought up because I actually heard this new

(27:30):
song um that I really enjoyed called Paranoia Party by
Francis Forever, and when I heard it, I absolutely got
tons of frison from it, like, um, there's a real
nice build, there's a big change from like quiet to loud.
There's a lot of patterns kind of breaking down and
then re emerging, a lot of these things that perhaps

(27:50):
influence frees on and um. So I posted it on
the discord channel for Record Store Society, going, oh man,
I get big time frees on for this, and a
couple of people were like, I had to google that word,

(28:12):
but now that I know what you're talking about, me too.
And then someone else go like, oh, me too, and
someone else would say like, me too, And I have
to say that this is again, here's that word anecdotal,
entirely anecdotal. But like one of the people on this
message board for extreme music nerds, everybody was feeling It's
like there there wasn't anybody who did not know what

(28:35):
the feeling and sensation of freeson was. So it says
something about attention and it's that chicken or egg thing again.
I believe also at least one study I was looking
at found that people tend to find familiar music more
likely to cause frees on. Yeah, I can. I can
definitely see that in particular with that song I was
just talking about the first time I heard it, certain

(28:59):
things things would make a hit for me. For example,
a sudden change in volume, because that's something that is
going to hit me no matter what. I don't need
any prior knowledge. Just volume is volume. But then the
second time I listened to that same song, the anticipation
that I knew that the volume change was coming that
hit me in a different way too, And I felt

(29:20):
it from the anticipation as well. So yeah, yeah, I
believe that as well, that that the a familiar song
can cause it for reasons other than just purely um,
what's there. It's not just about anticipatory chills, yes, chill
chills and feelings of free song leading up to the
moment of sort of the peak of that you're you're anticipating, right, yes,

(29:44):
roller coaster, yes, yeah, But I feel like what we
were just saying would sort of go along with it
with the study that I was looking at. Seth, I
think I actually dug this up because you you found
an article a popular level article by one of the
authors of this study, So this was by Mitchell C.
Culver and Amani L. Lay published in the Journal Psychology

(30:06):
of Music in two sixteen called Getting Aesthetic Chills from
Music The connection between Openness to Experience and freesan. So
this is another entry in the the who gets freesan
from music? Question? So this study compared people's reports of
their feelings of freesan and music with physiological responses like

(30:26):
measuring things like skin conductance responses, and a personality typology
test that was based on the five factor model. Now,
if you're not familiar that, the five factor model is
a way of sort of classifying people's personalities according to
five different metrics, so you know, you can sort of
get an idea of many things about a person and

(30:47):
what kinds of preferences they might have, what kinds of
behaviors they might show if you know their scores on
five different measures, and these measures would be conscientiousness, agreeableness,
near otisism, extroversion, and openness. So listeners who experienced free
songs tended on average to be higher in the trade

(31:08):
openness it's also known as openness to experience. I was
looking for a good, uh succinct definition of openness to experience.
This one comes from the Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology by
McRae in two thousand four, and it identifies that the
relevant traits of openness to experience our tolerance of ambiguity,

(31:29):
low dogmatism, need for variety, esthetic sensitivity, absorption, unconventionality, intellectual curiosity,
and intuition. So people who are high in the trade
openness tend to be more interested in and tend to
prefer difference, variety, and novelty, whereas people who are lower

(31:51):
in trade openness tend to prefer what's familiar and traditional. Wow,
it's interesting. So in a write up feature about this research,
one of the authors, Mitchell C. Culver, wrote, quote, while
previous research had connected openness to experience with freesan, most
researchers had concluded that listeners were experiencing freesan as a
result of a deeply emotional reaction they were having to

(32:14):
the music. So right, the idea would have been maybe
people who are higher and openness to experience are just
more likely to have deep emotional connections with music. But
uh Culver goes on to say, in contrast, the results
of our studies show that it's the cognitive components of
openness to experience, such as making mental predictions about how

(32:35):
the music is going to unfold, or engaging in musical imagery,
which is a way of processing music that combines listening
with daydreaming, that are associated with freesan to a greater
degree than the emotional components. In a whole bunch of
kind of conflicting information that we are receiving and kind

(32:55):
of like experiencing with this whole thing. That's one of
the biggest ones to me is that lie the emotional
experience of openness based on the cognitive components of openness,
You know what I mean? Like that that that's that's
that's a head scratcher, that that's It makes sense to
me in a way. But again, we're talking about the

(33:17):
emotion plus the intellect in a very strange way. Yeah, exactly. So,
So it's possible that their their findings are incorrect, But
if Culver and Ela lately are correct, what they're saying
is that people who are high in the trade openness
are perhaps not getting more freaes on experiences because they're
more emotional, but because they tend to engage in more

(33:39):
pattern recognition and prediction behavior when listening to music, that
they're more likely to be engaging with the piece of
music in a way that seeks out patterns in the
structure of the song and tries to predict what's coming next,
And that that activity is more highly associated with these
extremely powerful psychophysiological experience arians is more so than the

(34:01):
than the emotional components. And I think that's interesting for sure. Yeah,
and and and at least in my own experience, I
can definitely feel that to be true if I look
at the songs that give me free SAN patterns and
then a subversion of a pattern or a almost like
doubling down on a pattern, like like either way can
really do it. But but but really am some sort

(34:25):
of accent upon a pattern? Whichever path you want to
take on that this will come back. A major theme
in the research about the underlying mechanisms of freesan has
to do with patterns and prediction and UH and anticipation.
But anyway, to move on to other things. So that
that was that people who are higher in the trade
openness tend to report more freesans UH. There is another

(34:47):
There is apparently a social component. I was reading a
note that a researcher named Alf Gabrielsson in two thousand twelve,
in a work called Strong Experiences with Music, reported that
people who listen to music together with a friend partner
experience more activation of the autonomic nervous system, which is
associated with these these reactions in the body. The autonomic

(35:07):
nervous system is UH is the part of the nervous
system that controls things that are that are involuntary in
your body, such as maintaining of course, you know, heart
rate and digestion and breathing and all that, but also
homeostatic responses, responses to changes in temperature, and the fight
or flight response, which is specifically a subset of the

(35:29):
autonomic nervous system known as the sympathetic nervous system, and
the sympathetic nervous system appears to often be activated in
these frees on experiences. So some things going on in
the body where a musical free san has something in
common with the fight or flight response, which is very
interesting and we'll get more into that later on. Thank Now,

(35:56):
another way to approach this question of who gets musical
free so on um is can we learn anything by
identifying what people have in common when they don't experience
musical frees on. Uh So, Again, I mentioned earlier that
presentation I was watching by the researchers Psyche Louis uh
and she was talking about studies that have been done

(36:17):
with people who have what's called musical and hedonia, and
this is a condition where people just do not really
derive pleasure from music. Now, it's important to specify what
musical and hedonia is not. It's different from what's known
as a musica or tone deafness. People with musical and
hadonia do not show major errors in their perception of music.

(36:39):
They can hear it just fine. And it's different from
general and hedonia. So people with musical and hedonia can
derive pleasure from other things. It's not a generalized lack
of pleasure. It's just a lack of pleasure from music.
And one thing Louis talks about is research that has
found that people with musical and hadonia have different patterns

(37:00):
of connectivity between the auditory regions of the brain and
a region of the brain known as the nucleus incumbents.
Uh So, the nucleus accumbens is important in the reward system.
It is used to drive motivation for the anticipation of rewards,
including things like food, sex, money, and drugs. Basically, like

(37:21):
anything you can think of that would be, you know,
kind of pleasurable stimulus that would really motivate you to
want to get more of it. That motivation to get
more of it is mediated by the reward system in
the brain, including the nucleus accumbans. This might be also
very unscientific for me to say, but all those things
also seem to have um elements of um anticipation and dopamine.

(37:44):
Oh yes, exactly. So the thrill you get in anticipation
of one of these things, food, sex, money, drugs, any
of these these things, Uh, the thrill you get in
the brain while you're in pursuit of that goal is
very much related. That is the reward system working to
motivate your behavior. Now, another interesting thing about who gets
musical freesans. I was reading a about a study by

(38:07):
the Estonian neuroscientist Yak punk Sep, who found in research
in nineteen in the journal Music Perception that at least
in his study that women reported experiencing chills from music
somewhat more more often than men did, though obviously, people
of all genders get the chills. It found that it
was a little bit more common in women. And also

(38:28):
there was an interesting observation from punk sep study which
was this quote, many mistakenly believe that happiness in music
is more influential in evoking the response than sadness. A
series of correlational studies analyzing the subjective experience of chills
in groups of students listening to a variety of musical
pieces indicated that chills are related to the perceived emotional

(38:52):
content of various selections, with much stronger relations to perceived
sadness than happiness. So, according to poccepts research here, sad
music is more likely to cause free songs in reality,
but when people are just sort of asked to speculate,
they tend to believe that happy music causes it more.

(39:14):
Isn't that fascinating? And it makes me wonder like, could
this be related to confusion in reflecting on your own
experiences of free song Because maybe even though it actually
happens to you more often with negative valenced esthetic content,
you know, sad music, sad movies, the experience itself is
somehow pleasurable, So maybe you mistakenly believe it to be

(39:38):
caused by more positive valenced content in your memory. At
least I don't know that that's the the causal chain there,
but that that mistake that people make is interesting. Yeah,
it definitely could be some sort of confirmation bias, um,
because even now when you said that, I thought to myself, Okay,
what are all the examples I'm thinking of? They are
one percent happy songs, I I And I think part

(40:01):
of it, at least for me, is there's perhaps something
triumphant in a lot of the songs that creates the
free song feeling in me. Um, maybe a bit bombastic.
I'm not going to apologize that I get tons of
free song from limbs Rob, but you know, when when
when do you hear the people sing? Comes on? I
I get that feeling all over And there is something

(40:22):
that is triumphant about that song. But there's a there,
there's a subtlety to it, or there's an ambiguity to
it because the song and its lyrical content and even
something about the way it sounds implies a kind of
risk or threat. Does that make sense? It does? And
and and perhaps that kind of duality is just part
of music. In general, Like I was thinking about that

(40:43):
Beatles song. Um, it's like, I've got to believe it's
getting better, It's getting better all the time. And then
you hear John Lennon say it couldn't get much worse.
Were like, it seems like a very positive song unless
you pay attention, and it's like, oh no, no, this
is a very sad song that is hopeful perhaps, and
perhaps that that that dichotomy. It's just a part of

(41:04):
music in general, which which needs to be factored in
as well. Huh so do you yes for me? Do
you hear the people sing? It is sort of triumphant sounding,
but in its lyrical content it is a demonstration of
courage in the face of near certain death. Right Wow, yeah,
fascinating fascinating stuff anyway, So ready to move on to

(41:24):
maybe the next question, which is what triggers freesan and music, like,
what are the specific auditory triggers that bring it about
most often? Again, this is something where there's probably going
to be a lot of idiosyncrasy in people's responses, but
there are certain things that do tend to emerge as
as like the most common triggers. And here I'm going

(41:45):
to be referring to I can't remember if I already
said the name of this paper. I think I didn't.
But this is a paper that is a a review
of the of the existing research on frees on asen
by Luke Harrison and Psyche Louis who already mean. And
it's called Thrills, Chills, freesans and skin Orgasms Towards an
Integrative Model of Transcendence Psychophysiological Experiences in Music. And this

(42:09):
is published in Frontiers in Psychology, and they collect some
of the existing research on musical frees on inducers. One
big study that looked into this was slow Boda in
and this one found that the common types of musical
phrases that bring people to a state of freesan were quote,

(42:29):
chord progressions descending the circle of fifths to the tonic.
Very specific. Uh, then melodic appoggiaturas. So appoggiaturas are when
there is a grace note or grace notes added to
a melody before or between the expected notes. I feel
like it's kind of hard to explain without singing it.

(42:50):
I kind of don't want to sing it because that
would sound pathetic, But I know what you mean. It's
that quick anticipatory note right before the actual kickoff of
the chorus or the verse or the bra or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So if you can imagine a familiar melody, say, imagine
somebody singing the melody of of London Bridge is falling down,
but adding in little grace notes in between the familiar

(43:12):
notes of the melody. Does that make sense? It does
to me, but does it make sense to our listener?
But then also the onset of unexpected harmonies, This is
a huge one for me. A lot of the ones
that I can think of are when or when harmonies
come in, when vocal when new vocals are added. Yeah. Uh.

(43:33):
And then they also say and melodic or harmonic sequences,
which seems very unspecific to me. Is I'm not sure
what to make of that. But they also cite another
study by Grua at all or Greva at all in
two thousand seven that found um that the onsets of
freees on were quote most likely to occur during peaks
in loudness, moments of modulation, and works in which the

(43:55):
melody occupied the human vocal register. Uh, And that sounds
right to me. A big thing is changes in volume,
dynamic changes, sudden dynamic leaps where you go from UH,
where you go from soft to suddenly loud, or from
loud to suddenly soft. Those have been shown to elicit
freesan um. But then also sudden changes in say the

(44:19):
register when you jump up an octave or something like that.
And they point out that these uh, these triggers tend
to point in the direction of frees on having something
to do with expectancy violation, because almost all of the
things that have been identified as major triggers of freesan
are when a song has established a pattern and then

(44:40):
the pattern suddenly changes in some way. That all makes
sense now, I guess it's time to move on to
the question of why does this happen? This is really
the big puzzle, right. So, you've got something that's just
a song. It is you know, music, It is vibrating
air molecules that are stimulating your ears. It's sound that
occurs in a certain pattern or or or cycle of

(45:02):
tones and rhythmic pulses, and somehow that means something to you.
And it not only means something to you, it triggers
this powerful response that seems to involve uh, the emotions
and and pleasure seeking and and the full body, and
and maybe something having to do with the autonomic nervous
system kind of like a fight or flight response would.

(45:25):
So it's this big mess that's obviously really complicated. So
one of the things that I thought might be helpful
to start by looking at is one specific subset of
musical free so on, which is the experience of goose bumps.
So it's actually, I think, at root, a fascinating question
in itself. Why would human beings get goose bumps from

(45:45):
esthetic reactions to art and music? You know, this is
a biological response that it's at least at first glance,
hard to identify a cause and effect relationship for right, Yeah,
it doesn't make much sense intellectually. Yeah. Uh So when
you get goose bumps, the technical term for what's happening
here is pilo erection. It's also sometimes known as the

(46:06):
pilo motor reflex um. And what's going on in your
body when you get goose bumps is that in your
skin at the base of your body hairs, there are
these little muscles known as erector pilli and when these
muscles contract, it causes your hairs, which are normally relaxed
and lying flat to suddenly stand on end. It's sort

(46:26):
of like pulls them down tight and they stand straight up,
And the question would be why does the body do this? Well,
there are a couple of major explanations that are correlated
with what normally causes goose bumps or or similar reactions
in animals, especially animals with more hair than us. One
answer is the cold. When you are cold, your body

(46:48):
is losing heat through the skin, and the pilo erection
response is an evolutionary adaptation that helps protect the body
against heat loss by insulating the skin. So your body
detects a hill and it protects itself by contracting the
erector pilly, causing the body hair to stand up. This
obviously would have been much more useful to human ancestors

(47:10):
who had significantly more body hair than we do. It
does a lot less to help insulate our relatively unhaired
bodies today, but it seems to be a somewhat vestigial trade.
Like when we get cold, we still get the goose bumps,
as if we had a big coat of fur to
help insulate us when when our skin did that. But
it's not just when we get cold. There are also
threats of danger that caused the polo motor response. So

(47:33):
the body deploys the same reflex, the same pilo erection
in response to sudden shocks or fear or threats of danger,
and the evolutionary reasoning is that this provides a survival
advantage because pilo erection makes the body look bigger. So
you've probably seen a cat that gets spooked by some
kind of possible threat, maybe an aggressive dog, or maybe

(47:55):
just a cucumber on the floor or whatever. It seems
to detect the possibility that some other kind of animal
is they're threatening it, and its first stands up on end.
Now the cat looks thicker, larger, it looks more dangerous
and able to defend itself, which means that this other
animal or or pseudo animal is less likely to attack.

(48:16):
And these explanations for the pilo motor reflex have been
known about for a long time. Actually. Charles Darwin wrote
about these reactions and goose bumps in his book The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in eighteen
seventy two, where he wrote that quote hardly any expressive
movement is so general as the involuntary erection of the
hair's feathers and other dermal appendages, and he noted correlates

(48:39):
of these in in not just mammals, but in mammals
and in birds and in reptiles, which I thought is interesting.
So the evolutionary reasoning connecting goose bumps to a survival
advantage in the in the case of cold or threats
makes very solid sense. But why would this connect to
abstract emotions or to esthetics like music? So I was

(49:00):
looking around for good explanations of this. One thing I
came across was an explainer I found in Scientific American
from two thousand three by a physiologist and professor of
zoology at the University of Gulf in Ontario named George A.
Boubin Ick, who said that basically all goose bumps responses
involve the release of adrenaline and the activation of the

(49:21):
autonomic nervous system like we were talking about earlier and
uh Bubinic writes quote. Adrenaline, which in humans is produced
in two small bean like glands that sit atop the kidneys,
not only causes the contraction of skin muscles, but also
influences many other body reactions. In humans, adrenaline is often
released when we feel cold or afraid, but also if

(49:42):
you're under stress and feel strong emotions such as anger
or excitement. Other signs of adrenaline release include tears, sweaty palms,
trembling hands, and increase in blood pressure, a racing heart,
or the feeling of butterflies in the stomach. Uh So,
that's a little frustrating because it establishes the possible mechanism
in the endocrin or nervous system that may be partially

(50:04):
correct for explaining the mechanism in these cases, but you're
still kind of left wondering why, right rights? And also, well,
it's been brought up before this connection to fight or flight,
but the why has not been explained at all. Uh
So I'll try another one here. So this one, I'm

(50:25):
not sure how good of an explanation this is, but
at least I found it very interesting. So this is
what's known as the separation call hypothesis. This is another
evolutionary explanation for emotional chills. And this one goes back
to somebody I mentioned earlier in the episode, the Estonian
neuroscientist Yak punk Sepp, who he's known for creating the

(50:46):
note the term affective neuroscience the neuroscience of emotions and
uh punk sceps hypothesis. I found a good summary of
it in another paper that was by Benetic and Karen
Back in Biological Psychology in two thousand eleven, so I'm
going to read their summary of of punk steps view.
He argues that the separation calls of lost young animals

(51:09):
used to inform parents about the whereabouts of their offspring.
These calls might have induced internal feelings of coldness and chills,
which enhanced the motivation for social reunion. A preserved responsivity
to certain acoustical features e g. Sustained high frequency notes
as often presented by solo performers, may represent an unconditional

(51:31):
component of the chill response. This theoretical approach, which could
be termed separation call hypothesis, thus relates pylo erection to
sensations of coldness and sadness. Uh So, this is interesting.
I'm kind of skeptical that this explains everything that's going on,
but it does touch on multiple features in a way

(51:52):
that would make some kind of causal sense in an
evolutionary perspective. So the idea is that Okay, you separate
baby rats from their mother, and the baby rats get
cold and they squeak at a particular frequency that triggers
the parent rat to locate them quickly, so the process
would go. The baby is alone, feels temperature decrease, the

(52:12):
baby releases a separation call. This causes a feeling of separation,
a feeling of loss or a kind of correlate of
sadness in the human context, and a feeling of physical coldness, chills,
or even goose bumps in the mother, motivating rapid reunion
and contact with the baby rat. So punk Step was
arguing that maybe these emotional goose bumps we feel in

(52:36):
in response to music have a deep biological root in
this mammalian separation call and and the response that we
would feel in in in reaction to hearing it, perhaps
some sort of like evolutionary left over kind of a thing. Right, So,
you have certain types of sounds or thought patterns triggering
this feeling of being moved, which which would simultaneously cause

(53:00):
a feeling of almost like physical coldness, the chilling, feeling
goose bumps, and a feeling of separation, and a motivation
to re establish social contact, which in itself would be
a a sort of a reward motivation where you've got
a goal now, and you're like, I need to get this.
I mean, um, if true, that's absolutely amazing everything that

(53:22):
could come from a simple like evolutionary leftover instinct. You know.
I think about the entire music industry coming from just
this leftover response that has kind of like almost um
almost pointed usn't the wrong direction, but we get so
much pleasure out of it anyway. Yeah, And I think
this may have something to it, and I've read that

(53:42):
there are some subsequent studies that kind of lent support
to it, at least in some cases. But it also
seems hard for me to imagine that this is the
direct route of all emotional chills. Uh. I mean, maybe
maybe this kind of causation is wrapped up in there somewhere,
But I'm still thinking about their ideas. So one of
the other ideas comes back to something that we we've

(54:04):
mentioned a few times now, which is about patterns and predictions. Now,
earlier I mentioned this conference presentation I watched by Psyche Louis,
the the musical neuroscience researcher. It was at the Brain
Mind Summit in m I. T And twenty nineteen, and uh,
and she talks about this hypothesis and in her presentation,
so she says that a lot of our response to

(54:26):
music has to do with fulfillments and violations of expectations.
So you think about what's your what's your actual experience
of listening to music? What is your brain doing when
you're paying attention to the music you're listening to. I
think it's that music establishes patterns. You know, phrases are repeated,
chord progressions, cycle, and often symmetrical ways. Popular music, of course,

(54:51):
has the very common verse chorus verse structure. Uh. And
though there are other types of music, like jazz and
classical music that are less repet titious and have less
to do with established patterns, they still do establish some patterns.
You can feel out the grammar of a classical symphony
or or a jazz improvisation, even though they might be

(55:12):
less repetitive than some familiar types of pop and rock music, right, Like,
maybe there's just a theme that repeats, or perhaps it
just being played in the same key. You go, Oh,
I can kind of predict where this is going to
go based simply on like instinctual knowledge of like, you know,
different chord progressions and different different um scales. That kind

(55:33):
of thing. So, Yeah, a piece of music has a
kind of implied grammar or syntax as kind of rules
that you can learn and then you use that to
predict how it's going to develop from the present moment.
And so she talks about how this feeling of being
able to predict what's coming next usually is something that
we find rewarding in the brain, like in the actual

(55:54):
reward system. Uh, the ability to say, hey, I think
I know what's going to happen next, and then anticipating
and then trying to see if your prediction is correct.
That is a reward motivation process in that part of
the brain. And this actually comes back to something I
think we already mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode.
But the research finding um that people who get chills

(56:18):
from music versus people who don't get chills from music,
there are differences in the amount of fiber connecting different
parts of the brain. In this case, it's the amount
of white matter connecting regions of the auditory system where
you would be processing incoming sounds. Um in the temporal lobe,
two regions of the frontal lobe that Luis says are
important for emotion and reward again, specifically the nucleus incumbents

(56:42):
and the medial prefrontal cortex. And so this comes back
to the dopaminergic reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that
I think is sometimes a bit mischaracterized as being synonymous
with the feeling of pleasure, which is slightly off because
the dopaminergic reward system is not just response bole for
feeling good after getting what you want, but for managing

(57:04):
the salience of incentives, managing your awareness of things in
your environment that you might want and your motivation to
get them. So dopamine increases in the brain in anticipation
of receiving a reward, and it plays a role in
motivating you to repeat a behavior that caused you to
get a reward in the past. So in our ancestral environment,

(57:26):
these rewards would be things that provided a survival reproduction advantage,
so food, water, sexual partners, but also things like parental care.
But our reward systems can also become motivated by rewards
that are at a sort of abstract remove, like money,
or perhaps things like enjoyable art and music, or even

(57:46):
by substances that stimulate the reward pathways chemically like opiates
or cocaine. But from some of the neuroscience research, it
looks like when we have these intensely pleasurable psycho physiological
responses to music, something is going on with the reward
pathway that has to do with predictions that pleasure in
music somehow has something to do with the listener recognizing

(58:10):
patterns and the reward seeking mechanisms in the brain being
motivated to detect and predict those patterns. This makes me
want to speculate, but I will not. I don't know,
go right ahead. My my speculation is this, um. I
remember basically reaching a certain age where you think to yourself, uh, gosh,

(58:31):
I hate school. Schools annoying, gosh, school what what a drag?
And then someone wiser will tell you, you know, school
isn't actually about the lessons. It's not about the homework.
School is about learning how to learn. It's about learning
how it to be intellectually curious enough that in the future,
when you do want to know something, you can teach

(58:52):
yourself how to know it because you've learned how to learn.
And in my mind, I'm thinking about how music is
kind of instilling this desire for pattern recognition, which personally
I do think benefits life, and I do think benefits
um oh, problem solving and benefits you know, making a

(59:14):
grocery list everything, You know what I mean, Like, patterns
are extremely useful in our society, So it's it's um
Perhaps it is an evolutionary leftover that makes us enjoy music,
but perhaps it has stayed with us because it has
proven to be useful in the regard of like it's
teaching us, it's improving us, it's making our brains a

(59:35):
little a little more fits because it's almost like we're
having a little training session by listening to music, by
enjoying art, by enjoying culture, and that makes everything else
in our lives a little bit better and a little
bit easier. So like music is teaching us how to
learn in a way pure speculation, Well, I definitely think

(59:56):
there could be something to that, but I would also
come back at it from the their angle, because it's
clearly not as simple as music sets up a pattern
that you can predict, and then when you correctly predict
the pattern, it's pleasurable. Because if if music is too predictable,
it becomes boring, right, And this goes sort of it,

(01:00:19):
at least on the face of it, seemed to go
against something we were talking about earlier, which is that
a lot of these peak experiences free sun come precisely
when patterns are broken or violated. It's not when it's
the most predictable and you're the easiest to get the
pattern recognition right. It's when something changes unexpectedly that you
feel the tingles all over. But at least for me,

(01:00:42):
that's the learning aspect of it. Um to to throw
something in that, perhaps Robert would say if Robert were here, Um,
there's a thing with meditation where, um, you know, if
you're trying to clear your mind and you're trying not
to think about anything, and then you accidentally think about
a slice of strawberry cheesecake, you know that's bad in
the regard that you're trying to think of nothing. However,

(01:01:05):
the active energy you take during most kinds of meditation
to clear your mind again, to go okay, get out
of my mind, strawberry cheesecake, I'm trying to think about nothing.
That is akin to like doing a rep. It's like
a kin to like doing something active to make you better.
So perhaps the subversion of patterns that we recognize our

(01:01:27):
brain does hit the little food pellet switch and go,
good job, you noticed, you know, aren't you a smart
little person? Keep up, keep it up. You know you're learning.
You're you're you're you're being um, You're being someone trained
to understand patterns when they change, and perhaps to pay
extra attention to when they do change, because that's perhaps

(01:01:49):
when life is at its most dangerous, is when the
when the patterns are subverted, not when the patterns are
the same. Well, that actually ties into something else I
came across. So I mentioned earlier that I watched that
video that was an interview with a music neuroscientists named
Matt Sachs and uh Sacks had speculated, Now this is
actually going more back back in a previous uh possible

(01:02:11):
explanation that we were talking about for the neurobiological mechanisms
of pleasure and freees on. But when when you go
to the idea of the arousal of the autonomic nervous system,
you know, the fight or flight response, uh and and
getting goose bumps as a result of a of cold
or being under threat, Sacks is talking about the pleasurable
response to music in those terms maybe getting goose bumps

(01:02:33):
is like a threat, and he speculates, I'm not sure
how much research there is to back this up, but
he speculates, and maybe sometimes high pitched notes or sudden
dynamic changes in music are actually initially reacted to by
the body as a kind of threat. And it's like,
you know, when you detect a loud sound, what does
that usually mean? It usually means like there's something you

(01:02:55):
need to pay attention to because it's possibly dangerous. But
then he specula lates that after the startling sounds such
as the dynamic change in the music or the sudden
high voice or something, is rationalized by the prefrontal cortex
and judged actually safe, that's when the sense of pleasure comes.
It's in the realization that your your brain has sort

(01:03:15):
of been startled into a semi fight or flight response
by something in the sound, but actually it's just a
piece of music. And it's like realizing that the threat
in a horror movie is not actually dangerous. I was
just thinking the same thing, like like a horror movie,
like a roller coaster, it's um a safe exploration of
fear and anticipation is definitely a big part of that,

(01:03:36):
I mean, think about any jump scare in a horror film.
You know. Yeah, interesting? Thank But anyway to come back
to Harrison and Louis in their summary of of a
study from two thousand one by Blood and Store, Uh,
they write that these researchers quote showed with pet scanning

(01:03:58):
of people under musical esan that patterns may reflect a
craving reflex similar to that surrounding responses for food, sex,
and drugs of abuse. It's possible, then, that the reason
we develop such affinity for freesan inducing music is that
once we experience musical freesan, we develop a dopaminergic anticipation

(01:04:20):
for its return, effectively becoming slightly addicted to the musical stimulus.
I mean, that's an analogy I've made before when it
comes to um seeking out new music, that it is
similar to a drug and being a person who is
very much a teetotaler in every way, I do not
want to diminish people's actual addictions to real drugs, but

(01:04:42):
following the same patterns, uh yeah, of just like, oh,
I I think I can find a another album, Like
I haven't heard a new album that really got me
excited lately. I gotta I gotta go to go down
to the record store. I need to go find something else.
I gotta go dig through some crates. And it's just
sort of like that feeling of there's something out there,
there's something out there that's really good and you haven't
heard it yet, so you need to go get it.

(01:05:05):
You need to go find it, you need to talk
to people and uh and those are the things you
can do on record store society, find it wherever you
find podcasts. Do do you when you're seeking out new
music do you actually have like the these direct pleasurable
experiences in mind is like sort of the thing you're
questing after, Because while I do love them in music,

(01:05:27):
I remember when I was more obsessed with like finding
new music, I had a probably a stupider idea in
my head which was like, once I hear this album,
then finally I'll understand music. Do you know what I mean?
I do? I definitely do. I I felt that also,
um where in particular, if there were albums that everyone

(01:05:48):
said were truly truly great, and I would go, oh, man,
I'm gonna I'm gonna find this album. Let's say it's
The Velvet Underground and Nico, you know, the famous one
with the Andy warhol bin and on the cover. I
um where I'm like, this is that album that everyone
keeps talking about. One day I'm going to find it.
I'm gonna listen to it, and then I'll know what
everyone's talking about, and I will have achieved something. It

(01:06:09):
will be like a totem somehow that I have found
and listened to this album. Obviously, this is way before
any kind of streaming media, so it was much more
difficult to track down and purchase an album when I
was a kid. Um. But but in that same regard,
I would say, to answer your question about seeking it
out and does that provide some sort of pleasure, I

(01:06:30):
do think that for me personally, the things I love
most in music are um, progression, change, experimentation, people trying
new things. I really love really experimental, really you know,
for lack of a better word, odd music. I really
enjoy that. And not to say that I don't also

(01:06:51):
enjoy you know, some some beatles as well. But um,
but that being the case, I would not be surprised
if deep down, subconsciously me perpetually seeking stranger music, seeking
the experimental and the you know, the the the new
for lack of a better word, is perhaps trying to

(01:07:13):
find that thrill again, find that that that roller coaster,
find that um that that that that that jumps scared
from that that scary movie. You know. Oh well, this
is interesting because this connects to something else I was reading.
So I was reading an interview with a researcher named
Dr Ygan vassel of z Ki, who studies the science

(01:07:35):
of the human response to art and aesthetics that I
place called the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and
he'd done some work on essentially people's frees on reactions
not just to music, but to other genres of arts,
such as poetry, because also people can get free on
from poetry, and so he did a study on that.
And one thing he noted this was in the context

(01:07:55):
of poetry, but I think it's probably also true of music,
is that he found that it experienced people need more
complexity in order to be affected. So basically, the more
experience you have with a genre of art, usually the
weirder you need it to be. That makes sense. No,
I've made this analogy myself where people have asked me, oh,

(01:08:17):
why are you listening to that noise, like literally, you
know noise. There's a lot of noise albums that I
very much enjoy, And I'm like, I think about it
like a foodie where there's a person out there who
you know, they love pasta and they eat their pasta
and it's so good. But at a certain point, after
they've really really focused and studied and had so much
pasta's coming out their ears, they're like, you know what,

(01:08:40):
I think, like, I need to go to this like
gastro Microbiology center where they give me like a pasta
foam and like a sniffter of basil liquefied that I
inject in my arm. Like like I I do think
that all art does eventually become stranger and stranger, and
I think that goes for everything. I think that goes
for shoes. Sneaker heads will probably do the same thing,

(01:09:01):
same thing with them, people who are really into cars,
people who are really into um, I think everything, honestly,
I I do think all aesthetic appreciation eventually gets really
strange because you're perhaps getting a little bored and you're
looking for that new feeling again. Does that happen with everything?
So I wonder about cars. Like if you if you
are somebody who's obsessed with cars, you go to all

(01:09:23):
the auto shows and you read all the car blogs
and all that. Eventually, are you like only interested in
batmobiles and rocket powered cars and stuff or like, I
don't know, I wonder about that. I think this will
relate again to what we were looking at, um before,
with like the different kinds of brains, where there was
the one kind of brain. Um that this is when
you're talking about openness. How one was looking for the novel,

(01:09:46):
looking for the new, and the other one was looking
for the traditional, looking for the essential, you know. And
I really do feel like, perhaps let's let's take a
car example. I think neither of us are car guys,
but we will put ourselves in that world. There is
so one that goes no, my nineteen sixties Corvetts is
the perfect car that I will love forever. And then

(01:10:07):
there's another person at the same car show who's looking
at all the like the fancy like I don't even
know what they're called, but like the like the prototype
cars that will never actually be made but always look
really really neat and futuristic and you know, blade runner esque. Um,
they'll only drive one of those spike cars from Fury Road. Yes,
and so I think both exist, and I think both

(01:10:29):
exist in also in every form of art, like there
are people who are I only listen to classic rock,
and there are people who are like, no, I need
I need some chainsaws on ice cubes, you know, through
reverb chambers. So I I it's all there. You know,
some people like Thomas Kincaid, some people like Picasso, and
I think it's it's all good. It's all good. And

(01:10:51):
I think perhaps what you're talking about with the the
differences between openness and just what brain connectivity does for
you personally might might help explain that. And Frison, yeah,
I think you could be right about that. So I
realized time is running short. But there's one more thing
I wanted to hit before we wrap up, because I
think this is interesting as well. Um, So I came across,
like I mentioned, this researcher named Oregon Vessel of is Key.

(01:11:14):
He's got a study I was looking at published in
Social Cognitive and affect of Neuroscience, but actually found what
was really interesting was an interview with him done by
a poetry journal called The Napkin Poetry Review, and In
this interview, this guy was talking about the concept of
pleasure in negative emotions, which I think is something that

(01:11:35):
really does need to be addressed if we're talking about
uh freesan in in music, because it's so often in
in songs that are sad or have some kind of
negative valence. And actually he points out that, you know,
Aristotle wrote about this apparent paradox, like why do people
enjoy going to the theater to watch tragic plays that
are full of pity and fear and anguish? Are these

(01:11:57):
emotions not painful when we experience them in our lives?
And the answer is yes, they are. But there must
be something about experiencing them in the context of a
play that transforms these negative emotions into something pleasurable that
we want to seek out and repeat. And as an analogy,
you might think, of course, about that sad song you

(01:12:18):
can't stop listening to. There's some kind of pleasure in
the aesthetics of sadness. Um. Now, another way of possibly
explaining this is that Aristotle wrote also about the the
complexity of negative emotions themselves and how they often contain
pleasurable aspects. So, for example, he wrote that anger always
has an element of pleasure in it, because the person

(01:12:41):
who's angry is always at some level sort of experiencing
a thrill from from the expectation of vengeance for you know,
the way they've been wronged and uh, and obviously you know,
there's a lot of media that clearly seems geared towards
just making people recreationally angry. Sometimes people want to get
angry about stuff. But you could also say that the

(01:13:02):
same could be true about sadness, that maybe there is
something going on with sadness that maybe sadness can be
pleasurable in some ways if it's just say, due to
separation of loss, because there's this pleasurable anticipation of redemption
and reunion, the same way that anger could be pleasurable
because there's this anticipation of revenge. But anyway, for so

(01:13:24):
for for this researcher of Asalowski, he said that this
ended up making him want to study that the concept
of being moved, which is something that's clearly not just
like pleasurable or painful. It is this intense emotional state
that can blend positive and negative emotions into a single episode.
It's it's pleasure and pain indivisible. Actually um and that

(01:13:47):
he he added a hypothesis onto this concept of being moved,
which has been explored by by philosophers for centuries, which
is that it seems like peaque moments of being moved,
having this ambiguous complax X emotional episode where you're experiencing
both maybe joy and sadness at the same time. Those
experiences tend to be marked by emotional chills or goose bumps.

(01:14:09):
Yet again, and so he did some research looking into
this in people's responses to poetry and UH, and in
talking about possible reasons why people why we might have
this reaction, he says, you know, it could be that
it's it's conceptually when something feels important and at stake,
you know, when when it feels like that, the autonomic

(01:14:32):
nervous system is aroused and causes this goose bumps reaction
UH that is presented to the conscious brain as a
sort of signal that's something that's going on in the
art that you're listening to. You know, the music you're
listening to or the poem you're reading, something important seems
to be up for grabs and that you need to
be on alert and remember what's happening. Makes sense. And

(01:14:54):
this comes back to you know, I can think of
a lot of the things that give me goose bumps
in art that are somewhat positive, but they also, like
I was saying earlier with Lee misserab that involves some
element of like risk or change, maybe displays of courage
or new possibilities, which are themselves often very very kind
of scary. So coming back to what Vassel of Whisky

(01:15:16):
says in this interview, he says, you have the negative
emotion on the foreground and this antidote in the background,
or vice versa, but there's always this clash. You can't
really decide on if it's now positive or negative, so
it's somehow both and this creates a lot of tension.
But importantly, we can experience this clash from an esthetic
distance mode. So it's something about the the ambiguity of

(01:15:39):
these uh, these you know, stimuli that elicit a combination
of pleasure and pain, of joy and sadness at the
same time that caused this feeling of being moved, something
about the the high stakes that seem to be suggested
by these by these complex emotional states maybe stimulate the
autonomic nervous system because it's making your body, in some

(01:16:00):
conceptual sense, feel threatened, as if there was like a
bear menacing you, and it's trying to get your attention
to do something about this, this concept that's being raised.
But then again, as with what we talked about before,
maybe it's possible that you realize you can trigger this
response with some kind of aesthetic stimulus like music or poetry.
And then and once you realize you can trigger it,

(01:16:23):
the reward system in the brain just wants to get
it again and says, well, let's try that again and again,
and and that's what motivates perhaps the pleasurable kind of
feeling there. It's the grasping after it. Yeah, I I
think we've answered some quell I'm not gonna say we've
answered some questions, but like you said, we we've identified
some puzzle pieces, we've laid them out on the table,

(01:16:44):
and we've taken a good look at them. What seems
most compelling to you now that we've talked about all this.
I do think that frison seems to me to be
an evolutionary left over that is tied to the fight
or flight response, and that perhaps our brains have misinterpreted

(01:17:06):
it into something that has made us enjoy art in
many ways, but in particular music which doesn't make a
lot of sense. However, that's what it's it's adding up
to in my mind. And yeah, and this could this
is a this is a deep, deep situation that we've

(01:17:26):
we've kind of dug ourselves into and I'm not sure
if we'll be able to get out all right. Well,
the next thing is everybody's gotta go listen to Record
Store Society. What's a what's a good episode for people
to start off with? Is something you've done recently you
think people should look up. Well, if they specifically want
to hear you and Robert, they got to check out.
Let's see. I think that's episode seventeen, and that episode

(01:17:48):
is called Video Dream And that's the one where we
do a deep dive into a whole bunch of our
favorite music videos. Um, let's see, there's a lot of
other really good ones. Oh man, Um, there's a really
great one called EP or not EP. That's episode nineteen
where that's there's a music journalist and author Matt Lamay.

(01:18:09):
He was one of the uh like the like original
like a Pitchfork writers back in the day. Um, and
that's a really fun conversation. We've got a really great
episode coming out this Friday, but I I suppose yeah
it's tomorrow. I can. I can stay here tomorrow. I've
got this really great musician named M Stage. He's one
of my favorites, and um, we're discussing music documentaries and

(01:18:32):
that's a very fun deep well so uh because I
M Stage, in addition to being a wonderful musician, also
happens to be a film professor in Chicago at a university.
So uh, he he's got a really great, um dual
knowledge that really music documentaries are the perfect subject to
have him talk about. So he's a lot of fun.

(01:18:53):
So anyway, Uh, there's always something fun going on. Every
episode is good. But but those are a few. Alright, folks, Well,
if that catches your fancy, you should go check out
Seth's podcast, Record Store Society. Uh. In the meantime, let's
see do we have anything else? Now? I guess that
wraps it up for today. But um, but yeah, if
you want to find any more of your of our podcasts,
we are stuff to blow your mind. You can find

(01:19:14):
us wherever you get your podcast. We're on all the platforms,
all the stuff like that, or you can just google us.
Of course, please as always hit subscribe if you're not
subscribe so you can get all of the episodes we
put out in the future. Big thanks as always to
Seth who is our wonderful producer, produces every episode of
this show and does it does such a great job. Seth.
We love you and we were I really appreciate you

(01:19:35):
coming on the show today. Very happy to do it.
And Robert will be back next time. That's right, yes,
so Robert will be back on the show in the
next episode and in the meantime. If you want to
get in touch with us to give us feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to

(01:20:01):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Musical Frisson with Seth of Record Store Society