Knowledge, curiosity, and aesthetic chills

Chills are amuscular phenomenon best described as the sensation of coldness created by a rhythmic oscillating tremor of skeletal muscles. In humans, chills are sometimes associated with a positive hedonic process. In the present article, we shall refer to such an event as aesthetic chills. Aesthetic chills appear to be a universal emotional experience (see e.g., McCrae, 2007). In laboratory, this phenomenon has mainly been studied in the field of musicology using tonal music as an elicitor (e.g., Harrison and Loui, 2014) but chills may also be elicited by visual arts, literature, scientific research and religious practices (Schoeller, 2015). A large body of evidence seems to point in the direction that chills, shivers, and goose bumps reveal something fundamental about human beings and their relation to the natural world (for insightful review, see Maruskin et al., 2012). However, to this day, there exist no systematic account for these psychobiological events and available data are often contradictory—compare Halpern et al. (1986) to Grewe et al. (2007) or Goldstein (1980) to Panksepp (1995). In the present article, I propose a theory that reconciles these contradictions, review empirical evidence for such a theory and highlight problems to be addressed in future research.