The Holy Shiver

She starts hearing these girls and creeks and realizes she is being stalked by the former bits of herself.

“Her flesh that she has cut away or there is a house that is maze like and haunted by quiet cruelties that occur between you and your partner and it feels like there is no way.”

Oh, wait, out. These are some of the stories of the prize-winning writer Carmen Maria Machado. Some of them are true, some of them are fiction, all of them are charged with this sense of spookiness. I have spent hours of my life being pleasantly spooked by her and so I was totally delighted when she wrote into our show wondering about something that had happened with her partner a four years Lauren Brown. You're rolling? Yes. That spooked her. Should I say you can say the first time Lauren I hooked up with each other. I noticed goosebumps on her body right before she liked hadn't orgasm but the pattern was really unusual. It wasn't just universal goosebumps. It was these kind of like leopard spot goosebumps.

“Sometimes I'll touch Lauren on the arm and she'll get goosebumps like where I touch her.”

So it's like you leave a trace.

Pretty elaborate reporter Maria Pascuteras. Yeah. And editor Soran Wheeler who sat in with Carmen and Lauren to hear the tale. Sometimes you have a you call crispy ones which is like they're really really pretty. Extra crispy is like I say that you could like great parmesan or like zest element on me. Like they just are like so intense and feel really like sharp. Right. So like as soon as we started seeing each other I think I was just like really paying attention like I was just like I've never seen this and I this isn't never happened to me like I mean you have goosebumps like all day like in some form or another.

Yeah, I'm pretty consistently getting them and what stuck out to Carmen wasn't just how often Lauren was getting goosebumps but it seemed like they would prickle up in response to almost contradictory things.

You know watching a sports highlight and music but then also like sometimes it's like moments that are like sad or like it doesn't actually like the same emotion every time.

“Yeah, and so it was just sort of in my head and then I was like even more closely watching Lauren and being like what is this?”

Sometimes I think about it and I'm like if I was a different kind of person I would be like I'm haunted. So Carmen started researching goosebumps and writing about them. She's now years deep into a novel with a title that comes from an old fashioned word for them. The Holy Shiver. I like that. Yeah, it's a term that's been used by scientists to describe the kind of goosebumps a prey animal gets when it realizes it's being watched by a predator. But also that the predator gets just before it goes in for the kill.

It's it's a rousal that like connects things like sex and fear and pleasure and excitement and so thinking about that. Like he was just sort of in my head and then I was like what is actually happening in your brain that's moving from like for whatever the reason is like it's moving from this sort of some kind of neurological impulse into your body and why. And then I was like certainly radio lab is done an episode on goose bumps that feels like a very, very anything to do. But it turns out we have not and so yes, so here we are.

So today on radio lab we write this wrong and bring you an episode all about shelter pool or free song in Spanish, Calofrio. Who's bumps sometimes they're called a skin orgasm. I've heard someone say God bumps we had out on a journey to find out why do we get them in these more mysterious situations and what if anything. Are they trying to tell us we're not necessarily aware but actually they're kind of magical some answers some chills and some honestly incredibly sci-fi sounding scientific experimentation.

Pause soren. Take us away. Okay.

“So reporting journey journey off on a journey.”

Right. Hi. So our first stop.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

I'm so excited. Was science writer Bonnie Soy. Bonnie Soy. I'm a journalist. I have written a lot about activity like movement like your body moving what that actually does to your brain.

Actually called Bonnie up because she actually wrote this book. It's called on muscle and sort of like this journey through all the muscles of your body. Your biceps, your butt, your heart and blood vessels and your gut. And she told us that after writing this book, he became obsessed with this one particular muscle. Yes.

There are the muscles that give us our goosebumps.

That would not, that was not what I would have expected.

Like you spent all this time writing a book about muscles. I know. I know so many sexy muscles, so many very obvious muscles and big muscles. And I, of course, went for the smallest and the weirdest. And I, why?

“I think the director of healing give us so much information about how we're doing and feeling.”

And I love that. I love that it's muscle as existential state. But backing up a little bit. Okay. So just to quickly explain the history of this muscle.

Around 200 million years ago or so.

Memals evolved from reptiles. In the process, they evolved hair or, you know, fur and then around the same time. Memals evolved this little muscle fiber. Little tiny muscle. It's attached to the base of every hair follicle underneath a skin.

That little muscles default is to kind of just chill. Yeah, exactly. You can kind of think about it being relaxed against your skin. Unless the brain is registering like something dangerous. That animal feels a threat. Let's say that animals hit with a sudden cold wind or predators.

It catches a predator or a competitor right at the corner of its eye. In that moment, the brain triggers this automatic response. It would send this immediate unconscious signal to all the different hair follicles. All across the body. And then, and then, all those tiny muscles contract, you know,

causing her to stand on end, giving you that goose bump appearance. Now, that could be a really useful thing. Because raised hair traps air next to the skin. So there's like a layer of warm air that's insulating. Keeping animals just a little bit warmer.

Or, it was also just useful if they were about to get into a fight. You know, if you have a cat, you see, like when your cat gets agitated, like the hair goes up. Like, "I'm bigger, I'm dangerous." But for us humans, you know, this response is kind of a stigil because we don't have that much hair anymore.

Not very useful. Or, most of us don't have that much hair anymore. So it's not going to really, it's not really effective. And so we end up with little bumps on our mostly hairless skin. But the really weird thing is that, as we have evolved as a species,

we humans started using this automatic survival reflex for things that seem to have nothing to do with our survival. So music, right? A swelling music, or like a really emotional scene in a movie,

“or like big places, like the ocean or the grand canyon or the edge of a cliff, right?”

And for us as humans, again, it's like less about the cold and less about the fear. And more about the way we experience the world. But, I mean, I'm still working in my head to connect these different categories of things. Like, or the goosebumps that used to just make hair stand up for thermal reasons and the goosebumps that used to make hair stand up for physical appearance reasons.

Now suddenly standing up for some, or is there one reason behind it all? I think, I mean, I hear what you're saying, right? How is this hair standing up for cold and fear now giving us this emotional component? But I think that, to me, it is intelligence. It is like body intelligence that I'm like paying attention.

What is it? I don't know what it is, but I'm paying attention.

Which, you know, it sort of made sense to us.

“I think that the body is trying to tell us to pay attention, but it, it just stuff just with this question.”

Like, what exactly is the body trying to tell us to pay attention to? We'll get to that right after this short break. You know that feeling when you hear a great tip, and it's like, that makes so much sense. Why haven't I been doing that all this time? If that's you, you might like life kit, whether you're looking to make changes around your health, your money, your relationships, your parenting, your guaranteed the, this is so helpful feeling.

Listen to the life kit podcast and the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Lulu, ready to lap goosebumps. We are back with reporter Maria Paz Gutierrez who has gotten a little stuck trying to figure out what exactly is going on with these special kind of goosebumps that humans get that have nothing to do with being cold or afraid. But then lucky for us.

He is rolling. Okay. We ran to a couple scientists. Hello. Good morning. Who have been studying this very particular kind of goosebumps, which scientists call aesthetic chills.

You know, shivers of psychological origins. I've heard someone say, God bumps. Good bumps. Yeah, God bumps.

“So anyway, these two guys, I can go first. Yeah. Hi. Our Nico. I'm Nico Regenzi. I'm currently the research director at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies.”

And his partner in crime. Hi. I'm Felix. I'm a senior research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies. He's a scientist. Felix Scholar. Yeah. So why goosebumps? So me when I started my PhD, Felix says back when he was starting out in grad school. I need the problem to work on. He'd been told that when it comes to these aesthetic chills, nobody really knows what they are and why they occur. And I thought that would be a good problem to work on. So his first step was to try to figure out exactly what triggers these kinds of chills.

The first I started asking everybody what gives you chills and building sort of this database of chills stimuli. And he found things that a lot of us would expect. Giant sport games in the stadium. People talk about being in the crowd when some impossible comeback happened. Totally.

Religion is a big thing. Personal religious revelations.

Sudden acts of kindness from a stranger that always gives me chills. Yeah, totally.

Very meaningful conversations with people and topics that you care deeply about. There are even these particular moments where experiencing music or poetry. Arts in general, but also science. A lot of physicists report that experienced chills when they discover a concept that allows them to make sense of a wide range of experiences. It's like the intellectual version of the holy shiver.

Like someone coming upon the prey of their idea and then, "Fuck, if they're about to get it." Yeah, kind of. I mean, you know, after like years of doing this research, talking to a lot of people. Reading a lot of books and documenting moments where... Felix says he landed on a theory.

It's when you sort of touch the limits of your knowledge. So I guess another way to think about chills is the limits of cognition. Oh, I love that. Like the limits of cognition. Like cannot compute nearly. Wow.

“Yeah, but the key is, Felix says, is when the thing that you cannot compute is a deeply held belief.”

Hmm. The basic idea is that we all walk around carrying these very broad generalizations about how the world works. Anything from what goes up must come down to the world is a dangerous place. Or humans are fundamentally good. Or money equals power.

We rely on these beliefs to help us navigate the world. And Felix says that when we run across some experience or feeling that challenges one of those deeply held beliefs. That's when we get the chills. Yeah. So when I was exposed to some of Felix's work, it kind of clicked that it's like, oh, wow, chills may very well be what it feels like to update your meaning-making process on such a large scale.

An idea and Nico's brain and I.

“So the story thinking, okay, how do we operationalize that idea and try to get empirical data so that we can do science?”

So they decided what they needed to do was get people in a lab. So they could give them chills. Induce it. Induce it. But doesn't it feel like that's unindusible?

Like, it's such a private spiritual thing. Not on the internet. So what does that feel like created in this algorithm that can span through YouTube networks and look at millions of videos and analyze all of the comments? Oh, I'm so sad right now. Keep going.

Specifically, they were looking for- When people mention chills, shivers, goosebumps. So they gather up all these videos.

Are these like very famous beaches from very famous people like Mr. Rogers, Carl Sagan's, the pale blue dot speech?

Some of them are just straight up life coach inspirational talks and footage of whales breaching stuff like that. And one that just completely, I did not expect was- You can't go anywhere. Commercials from Thailand. Wow.

Yeah. Whatever their Madison Avenue crew is has the finger on the pulse of chills. Seems like it.

“Okay, wait, I have seen one of these, I think, and it's about this guy who, like, helps all these strangers.”

Um, it totally worked. It totally give me chills. It's a very good commercial. What that probably means is that you've been walking around with this belief that people suck and that they're not generous or kind. Yeah.

So that's great.

I mean, it's a pretty direct hit on your worldview.

Yeah. But uh, they also stuff that a lot of these videos. We're just like straight up music. A lot of choral music. Especially these moments where-

The soprano singer suddenly takes over the entire, um, orchestra. There is something like out of reach. You don't be on? Didn't that sound? Yeah.

So they gather up all these videos from online and they actually brought people into their lab and had them watch these videos. So they could, like, see, like, which ones make the skin actually prickle? And they actually told us there's, like, one video that was, like, the number one trigger. [MUSIC] Hallelujah by Leonardo Cohen, song by Griffith Swainwright, with a large collection of people.

That is sort of singing along. [MUSIC] You know, this stimulus, for example, will give chills to seven to five people out of a hundred? Huh. Anyway, at the end of all this, Nico and Felix.

We're able to identify 300 stimuli that reliably induce chills in hundreds of people. Oh my god. So then they started showing people these videos in their lab. Three thousand participants in Southern California. With one extra little step in there.

Before we show them, the stimulus we asked them a range of questions, personality questions, demographics questions. What are they? All right. So please rate the following in terms of how much you agree or disagree with each statement. It is important to take care of people who are vulnerable.

In particular, they're asking questions that sort of help them zero in on some of those deeply help beliefs we just talked about. Some people think I'm selfish and what types of schemas are you running around with. You know, if you're seeing everybody as connected ones or as independent.

“Sometimes players and, you know, you need to get to the top.”

Not as dependable or reliable as I should be. And based on how you answer these questions. I find humor in almost everything. Nikolan Felix can figure out what gives you chills. Oh, interesting.

So like you, oh, well, you answered just to this. So that cross out the sports one. But ooh, that hallelujah, chorus. Yeah. So now they're making like the survey helps them create like a bespoke chills and do chills.

Playless. Yes. And I can predict with 73.5% accuracy. Which of the stimulus is the best one for you to look at right now. So that I can give you chills in my laboratory and study it under controlled conditions.

And with their little bespoke chills machine. Nikolan Felix have done a bunch of different studies. One of the coolest things for me was like they actually hooked people up to this like EEG machine. So they could watch their brains while they get the chills. And the moments when you have chills are almost indistinguishable from a psychedelic experience.

Wait, what? The way they described it, it's like the level of complexity and disorder in the brain signals.

Okay, that.

I mean, that really makes neurologically good on their limits of cognition thing.

“Like, there are watching a brain just go, hey, why are you?”

Yeah. You know, maybe some other people would have been like, okay. We sort of figured this out. Jouble done, but Felix and Nico were not done. Okay.

Because one of the things that Nico and Felix had heard about was that it wasn't just like you understood something or something changed inside you.

And then you got the chills, but rather that the chills came first.

Like the chills were this signal to the rest of your brain and body to notice something. A lot of physicists actually talk about how chills was instrumental in helping them understand the importance of some of the work that they were doing. So not so much I understand it and then get chills, but you seem to be saying that like, oh, the chills helped me know that I had understood something. Yeah, it's almost as though when you do get chills, it's this moment of calibration and orientation. So then they thought, well, if we can give people the chills, maybe we can use that to sort of hack the brain reverse engineer someone into this moment where they're ready to rethink the way they think about the world.

We have a funky term for this week, we go to schema surgery. Oh, that sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. Yeah, I mean, a lot of terrorist recruitment videos, leverage chills as this way of like showing this recognition of shared humanity and martyrdom for it. So there's like full ego dissolution. That is a really dark underbelly of some of this right because it's so motivational.

“The behavioral activation that emerges after chills is really potent, but dystopian aspects aside, right?”

But fortunately for us, what Felix and Nico are trying to do is use chills. As a novel from a treatment for major depressive disorder to help people with depression. Because when what? Because if you think about people who are depressed, like they're usually stuck in their world view. You know, they have these, what we go called, or Felix called these maladaptive beliefs, right?

Like, I'm alone in the world for I am bad. Yeah, so negative self-pedience, negative beliefs about others, and then negative beliefs about the world in general.

The word is a dangerous place. You never know what's going to happen.

Totally just these like calcified certainties. And what we've been doing is trying to use the chills stimuli that we've identified to try and open up people's minds. The gather evidence that will go against these dysfunctional beliefs, so that they basically expand the scope of their perception. This is early, early research, and they're trying to figure out a bunch of different things. But one of the studies that I thought was interesting focused on this one particular element of depression called anodonia.

And anodonia, right, and hedonically. They lack this ability to kind of feel pleasure, and that impacts their sensitivity to reward. So let's say you ask them.

“Okay, I have $5 in this hand, and $20 in this hand. Pick one, right?”

People with anodonia, they're indifferent. They'd be like, "I don't care. I really don't care." They'll choose the five and twenty with kind of equally likelihood. And this, they said, is one of the main characteristics of treatment resistant depression. For a simple reason, these are patients that are no longer motivated to take the necessary actions to get back to the business of life.

So Felix and Nico, they take these people one by one into a little room, sit them in front of a computer screen, have them take the survey. Yep. And then they're given... They're internet content to watch. They have some moment where their bodies going...

And after this experience, they put them through that reward task again, now what do you think? $5 or $20. They behave as if they were normal controls. They're like, "I want my $20. Give me my $20." And, you know, a great majority of the participants that, you know, even just experienced one chill, but even more so if you experience three chills,

Right? So it's like a clinically significant amelioration of some of their symptoms.

Okay, can I let me un-pricle my skin? Because I am feeling this. I am like, "Oh my god, like, you get the chills and you're certain she melts and then you can jump through this window to change your life and get your depression and remission." But then I'm also like, "Come on, no! You see, watch a couple videos a week of whales breaching and chorus is singing." And then you're like, "You can feel better from things that like full on meds and CBG therapy or whatever won't you?" I mean, it is early work.

They're still doing these studies, but, like, in most cases with depression, I imagine it's probably the right combination of a bunch of different things. Although, one of the things they do in one of these studies is, like, after people get the chills, like, they ask them, "What did you think about when you were experiencing the chills?" They'll sort of ask them about their goals, like, the things they want to do or achieve, and it does look like people after these chills, at least for a moment or a while, or whatever,

are sort of a little bit more motivated to just like, get up or out or do something, just engage with the world. That, to me, feels like sort of part of the mix of things that keep you alive. Something makes me think that this kind of chills is your, you know, it's maybe just as important as conserving warmth or looking bigger.

“Like, it's pointing you, almost like a compass toward where you need to go, what you need to engage with.”

So, in the midst of all of this, it turns out Nico and Felix's experiment where they give people chills. They actually have more recently turned this into, like, an app. I thought, I should go and try this. I want to see if you can actually give me chills. All right, and so what happened? So, I came into the studio, all right, here we are, here we are, my friends, and I opened the website.

First question about you, what is your name?

I took their little survey of questions.

“Would you describe yourself as someone who gets easily moved or touched, not that very often?”

And then, okay, based on your answers, we've chosen it served me this song. It's a song from a movie called Motorcycle Dyeries. I actually heard this song before, which coincidentally, I had watched two weeks before. And I was like, this is mid. When I watched the movie.

So, to be honest, I wasn't feeling very optimistic about getting the chills. But then I was like, okay, I'm going to actually sit with it and I hit play. It has this kind of like, tinge of sadness and longing and then there's this part where this kind of like, almost like a flute, like instrument comes in. It almost sounds like a bird and in that moment.

That's so hard. I felt the goosebumps on my skin. I feel it in my own legs, making their way up to my arms. And then I was just like looking at my arm and, yeah, they're nice and bumpy. That's so nice.

And it happened again. I got like another wave.

And I had just never had the experience of just being like hit like, like, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.

“Do you remember at all what you were thinking about?”

I think in that moment, I was thinking about a trip that I took to Chile. And it reminded me of this day where I was, I think I was doing some kind of like, kind of like field recording of the musician playing a harp and like in the street.

Like I used to just travel alone all the time, different places, all over Latin America.

But like as you get older like you're just not as crazy as you used to be. And it's uncomfortable.

“And I think that for me it's so much of reading the news creates this like illusion that like the world is like a really dangerous place.”

But I've been to these places a lot of these places that like are quote unquote dangerous. And even on just like a random street corner, there's so much beauty. And I also felt really safe. So in that moment was like the prickled skin, the waves. Was it sort of like those memories are in you.

And those places might be out there. And go. Just go. Yeah, go, go back out there. Just go.

And so regardless of how we label these goosebumps or exactly what triggers them.

It does feel like if you do take the time to notice these moments.

Give your brain the space to catch up with your body, which is clearly saying something. I think there's value in that. It might just loosen you up. And maybe even get you out the door in a slightly different way. Yeah, just like that alone don't don't just let them pass you by anyway.

I think there is one more thing that's worth saying about goosebumps. Hello. Hi. We have now learned many different shows. I'm so excited.

But yeah, it's something that actually came up when we called Lauren and Carmen back to tell them about all the things we've learned. There's a little bunch of little muscles underneath our skin. About the cold fears survival reflex.

And then in that moment, they stand up.

Got it. Okay. And about Nico and Felix's work on us that are chills. Whatever you ask these questions. And then they can deliver you the content that will get you to have the goosebumps.

Oh my God. Wow. And of course, about how these goosebumps are sort of the unconscious brain and the body's way of telling you that something important is going on. That's worth pausing and thinking about what you're like catching up to your body.

Yes. Yeah. That makes sense to me, too, even thinking about moments where I find myself just like completely covered in goosebumps. My whole body feels it.

Yeah, it's almost like your body is like tapping on your brain and being like, hello. But I feel like for me, it's like this place where it's like, but then Carmen told us that even though she doesn't get the goosebumps all that often, she does now find herself thinking about what Lauren's goosebumps are saying. Not just to Lauren, but to her.

Or like, I was assuming when you saw a list of Luke. I'm sure you had them then. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah.

“So I was out of tired of Lauren was texting me like you have to watch it.”

I am getting like patchy goose bumps right now. I have them on my legs and I have some of my arms. Okay, so quick context. Lisa Leo was a star figure skater when she was very young several years ago. And at sort of the height of her game under all this pressure to win,

she just straight up quit. She took some time off and a couple years later, she came back to participate in the Winter Olympics. She said I don't need a medal. I just need to be here and show people what I can do,

but what she doesn't know if she does that. Probably means a medal. And when you see her, she's clearly there on her own terms. She's creative kills it. Like, she gives a nearly perfect performance.

Once again, the triple left double left one double left. She looks so relaxed, so genuinely happy. Even the announcers are blown away. She stays so loose and the crowd is going wild. That's the secret, every athlete wants to solve.

“And when she finishes, she got off the ice and she's like that's what I'm fucking talking about.”

I know this feeling. I recognize that feeling. I love that feeling. Where I've been like, I did it. I mean, I watched it and I had like full body shell talking about it.

So I feel like, I do. I literally do. I don't know what I got. She had texted me. I think the next day after everything had happened.

I was like, I'm just watching clips of Alyssa Liu and the airport and crying.

Yeah, like, I get to like, it's like this her shared experience.

Right? And it like deepens my understanding of who Lauren is. Like, people of the same to me is like, God. Because it's like, this unknown is actually fundamentally unknowable thing. But with Lauren, it's like, I can get us physically close.

Is this humanly possible?

Yeah.

“Even if it's not rational, I just feel a little bit more known in that way, I think.”

Maria Paz Gutierrez. Thank you, MPG. Special thanks to Rachel Gross, Gregory Rappnik and to Carmen and Lauren who set us off on this whole journey.

Carmen Maria Machado is currently hard at work on her novel all about the Holy Shiver.

But in the meantime, she's got a new book coming out in fall of 2027. It's called a brief and fearful star. You can also find a link to Bonnie Toys beautiful book on Muscle on our website. It is not just about Muscle. It's also a message in a bottle to her dad.

“If you want to see Elisolio's gold winning routine or the Thai commercial or performance of Hallelujah,”

we mentioned that there are links on our website. This episode was reported and produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez with help from Cindy Nyama Sambandam. Mixing helps from Jeremy Bloom and fact checking by Angelina Cotto. Hi, I'm Gabby, I'm from the Bay Area California and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lettiff Nasser.

Soron Wheeler is our executive editor.

“Sarah Sandbach is our executive director.”

Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keith is our director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naina Sambandam, Matt Kielty, Mona Modgalker, Alex Niesin, Sara Curry, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogetz, Anisa Vizza, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young,

with help from Gabby Santas and Maya Applebee Millamid. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Semi. Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simon Foundation

and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.