#horripilation

A study by a group of researchers from Harvard and Harvard Medical school—”Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music”—published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience makes a strong case for a physiological connection between horripilation and aesthetic pleasure via music. 

Specifically, their results “from diffusion tensor imaging show that white matter connectivity between auditory perceptual regions (pSTG) and regions of the brain important for emotional and social processing (aIns, mPFC) reflect individual differences in the tendency to experience chills from music.” Score one for nature, I suppose, in the eternal battle of nature vs. nuture.

Me, I get art-goosebumps all of the time, especially from music, but also particularly well-written passages. Recent examples include the ending of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud a Solitude, which I won’t ruin but cannot recommend enough, and which I read as part of my research for a just-finished piece I wrote about Hrabal’s forthcoming memoir All My Cats. More on that later.

And then there’s the new Big Thief song, “Not.” I’m not intimately familiar with Big Thief, in part because I have a harder and harder time keeping up with music, and because their brand of “extremely serious folk rock” falls squarely into what I think of as the Leonard Cohen Bucket: excellent music that is difficult, functionally, to listen to. What, I’ve always wondered, is the proper occasion, or venue, for Cohen’s “Dress Rehearsal Rag”? Same goes for Big Thief, and “Not” in particular. It’s an intense, searing song; here are its opening lines:

It's not the energy reeling Nor the lines in your face Nor the clouds on the ceiling Nor the clouds in space

The whole song’s like this, and lead singer Adrianne Lenker delivers its lines with a growing sense of mania until, roughly three-and-a-half minutes into the song, the band breaks into a wild, sloppy, careening guitar solo that acts as a release, a release and a sort of keening, anguished yell. It’s a great solo. And every time I listen to it—like right now as I type this—all of the hair on my arms stands on end, standing and sitting as the solo hits its peaks and valleys. Thank you very much, white matter.

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