The science of chill-inducing music

As a (former) musician and someone who also interested in neuroscience and psychology, this article in Psychology Today, “How Your Favorite Songs Can Trigger Chill-Producing Moments”, grabbed my attention immediately. It discusses the (nerd alert!) mechanism of how certain songs – different for each of us, based on our musical taste – generate very measurable responses in the brain related to reward systems and dopamine release.

Also if you feel like going down the rabbit hole a little further, the Wikipedia entry on “Hedonic Music Consumption Model” is also interesting. It discusses the hypothesis that there are a number of emotional and experiential factors that lead us to buy music, but that ultimately “people buy music because of the ‘experience that the music creates by itself or because music can enhance other experiences, whether it is an individual or shared experiences with others'”(Lacher & Mizerski, p. 367).

Maybe it’s time to do an emotional reset by making a playlist of my favorite songs that have given me the chills in the past, and having a good immersive listen….