Do you really feel music? You know, get those good chills and tingly goosebumps when you hear certain songs?
For me, there are a bunch of tunes that take me to another place and spark a specific memory in my head.
Like this one…
Every time I hear it, no matter where I’m at, I flash back to myself driving around Kansas City, Missouri in my teens. Ahh, those were the days. #chills
Apparently, getting all the feels from music is pretty rare. A study from 2016 examined this phenomenon to see how getting chills and goosebumps from music is triggered.
Photo Credit: Flickr, GuiGui Les Bons Skeudis
10 people who do experience the aforementioned emotions and 10 who do not participated in a study by Matthew Sachs, a former undergraduate at Harvard. Sachs discovered that people who connect to music emotionally and physically have different brain structures than those who don’t. These folks tend to have a denser volume of fibers that connect the auditory cortex and areas that process emotions, resulting in the two areas communicating better with each other.
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Sachs believes that a strong attachment to music means a person has stronger overall emotions. He is currently conducting more research that focuses on how music that causes certain reactions affects brain activity.
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Sachs’ ultimate goal is to use his research to help treat psychological disorders. As he puts it, “Depression causes an inability to experience pleasure of everyday things. You could use music with a therapist to explore feelings.”
Using music to soothe the blues away? Let’s hope!