If You Get Chills When Listening To Music, It Could Be A Sign You’re Special

Oct 20, 2018 by apost team

People who get chills or a lump in their throat when listening to a good song might actually be special. Experiencing sensations in response to music is a sign that a person is special.

Matthew Sachs is a PhD student at the University of Southern California. Last year, as an undergraduate at Harvard, he partnered up with a team of researchers to study individuals who experience sensation while they listen to music. Sachs' goal was to analyze the phenomenon so he could identify how the human body stimulates this kind of sensation.

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The study was done on twenty students. 10 of the students reported experiencing chills through music, while the other 10 had not experienced such feelings.

Each participant listened to a piece of music they selected themselves. The researchers compared scans of the participants and realized that participants who had heightened sensation in response to songs actually had a different overall neurological structure from the people who didn't.

Brain scans indicated that when a person feels sensations while listening to music, their brain cells are structured differently from those that don't.

For the people who experienced chills, their brains had a higher volume of neurological fiber linking their auditory cortex to their emotional processing center. Since the fiber volume of the cells was denser, it let these parts of the brain connect better.

Actually, the fibers are responsible for creating a connection between the auditory cortex and emotional processing sensory, meaning that these people are very sensitive to emotions caused by auditory stimulation.

In addition, neuroscientists say that individuals who experience sensations with music might have strong overall emotional receptivity in comparison to other people.

The findings of the study were published through Oxford Academic. Though the study was only done on a small scale, it's paved the road for future studies to be done solidifying this knowledge.

Do you get chills when you listen to music? Let us know in the comments and show this to your friends and family to see if they're unique-minded, too!