Summary: Have you ever felt a sudden shiver or goosebumps while listening to a powerful piece of music or reading a moving poem? Scientists call this the “telltale tingle” or “aesthetic chills,” and a major new study eveals that your genetics play a significant role in this experience.
By analyzing data from over 15,500 people, researchers discovered that approximately 30% of the variation in experiencing chills is linked to family factors, with a meaningful portion tied directly to specific DNA variants. This explains why some people are moved “to their core” by art while others perceive the same sensory world quite differently.
Key Facts
- The DNA Connection: Common genetic variants account for a significant portion of why some individuals are more prone to aesthetic chills than others.
- Family Influence: About 30% of the difference in emotional sensitivity to art is related to family-linked factors.
- Shared Personality Traits: Some genetic influences are linked to “Openness to Experience,” a trait associated with general artistic engagement across music, poetry, and visual art.
- Domain Specificity: Interestingly, the study found that some biological mechanisms are unique to specific art forms, meaning the way you react to music might be genetically distinct from how you react to a painting.
- Neural Mirroring: Aesthetic chills engage neural systems similar to those that process biologically meaningful stimuli (like food or survival needs), proving art impacts us at a fundamental level.
Source: Max Planck Institute
Why do some people feel chills when listening to music, reading poetry, or viewing a powerful work of art, while others do not?
New research by Giacomo Bignardi and his colleagues from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) published in PLOS Genetics reveals that part of the answer lies in our genes.
Charles Darwin once described how hearing an anthem in King’s College Chapel gave him “intense pleasure so that [his] backbone would sometimes shiver.” Vladimir Nabokov (despite his notorious dislike for music) later celebrated the same sensation, calling it ‘the telltale tingle’ required to truly appreciate literary genius.
Thanks to Lifelines, a large, multi-generational cohort study of individuals from the northern Netherlands, MPI researchers were able to gather and analyze data on emotional reactions to cultural experiences from over 15,500 participants with available genetic information.
The study focused on ‘aesthetic chills’: those sometime goosebump-inducing moments often triggered by art, music, or literature.
Aesthetic chills
Aesthetic chills are moments of peak pleasure often accompanied by goosebumps or shivers. Because they are clear, measurable events that link subjective emotional experience with bodily responses, scientists have increasingly used them as a model for studying how humans respond to art.
Previous research has shown that chills triggered by music and poetry engage neural systems similar to those involved in processing biologically meaningful stimuli, and that stable individual differences in chills correspond to measurable variation in physiology and brain function.
Building on this foundation, the new study analyzed genetic data to examine whether DNA variation helps explain why some individuals are especially prone to these reactions.
Family-linked factors
The researchers found that approximately 30% of the variation in experiencing chills is related to family-linked factors. About one-quarter of this familial influence is attributable to common genetic variants, demonstrating a significant genetic contribution to emotional sensitivity to art.
Some genetic influences were shared across music, poetry, and visual art, and were associated with broader personality traits such as openness to experience, including general artistic engagement.
Other genetic effects appeared to be not shared across artistic domains, suggesting that different biological mechanisms may shape how people respond to music versus poetry or visual art.
“These findings suggest that genetics may offer an additional way to better understand why people can sometimes subjectively experience the same sensory world so differently,” Bignardi notes.
“However, much work remains to clarify how the genetic underpinnings of these experiences interact with environmental exposure and social dynamics.”
By demonstrating that genetics plays a meaningful role in proneness to chills from visual art, poetry and music, the study opens the door to future research on the biological foundations of emotional experience, and why art impacts some people – quite literally – to their core.
Key Questions Answered:
A: It’s a mix of your personality, your upbringing, and—as we now know—your DNA. About 1/3 of that “tingle” comes from family-linked factors. If your parents were moved to tears by a symphony, there’s a good chance you have the genetic toolkit to feel it too.
A: Yes! The study found that while some genes make you generally “artsy,” other genetic effects are specific to the medium. You might have the “poetry chills” gene but not the “visual art chills” gene.
A: Not necessarily intelligence, but it is strongly linked to “Openness to Experience.” People who get aesthetic chills tend to be more emotionally sensitive and more deeply engaged with their sensory environment.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this genetics and aesthetic chills research news
Author: Anniek Corporaal
Source: Max Planck Institute
Contact: Anniek Corporaal – Max Planck Institute
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music” by Giacomo Bignardi, Danielle Admiraal, Else Eising, and Simon E. Fisher. PLOS Genetics
DOI:10.1371/journal.pgen.1012002
Abstract
Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music
Art can evoke strong emotional responses in humans. Here, we examine genetic contributions to chills, a marker of such responses. We gather self-reports from a genotyped sample of thousands of partly related individuals from the Netherlands (n = 15,606).
Using genomic relationships based on common single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data, we find that up to 29% of the variation in proneness to aesthetic (visual art and poetry) and music chills can be explained by familial relatedness effects, one-fourth of which is attributed to SNP variation.
Furthermore, we reveal a moderate genetic correlation of .58 between aesthetic and music chills, pointing to shared genetic variation affecting susceptibility to strong emotional responses across different art forms.
Finally, we find that a polygenic index (PGI) for openness to experience (n = 220,015) is associated with susceptibilities to both aesthetic and music chills.
Our results show that additive genetic variation, but also familial relatedness beyond shared common SNPs, contributes to proneness to chills from artistic, poetic, and musical expressions.
These results open up a promising path towards studying the human attitude towards art, via both state-of-the-art genomics and intergenerational models of transmission.
