There’s a reason we gravitate to the music of our youth, no matter how old we are. When was the last time music made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, sent a chill down your spine or gave you goosebumps all over?
“For me, the feeling of frisson is most profound when you have that sense of awe, when you’re in the presence of something that is spectacular or difficult to access. Some people might call it the ‘divine’ or something bigger than yourself,” Wagner, 43, said. “The artistry at work is what’s causing the experience of awe, leading to that physiological response.”
Wagner said that while brain imaging can illustrate which parts of the brain are active, for example, when people listen to music and feel frisson, medical scans fail to fully explain why the experience is enjoyable. Yet, he said, those unknowables can still act as stepping stones that guide intuitional understanding of why we enjoy music.
Daniel Levitin, a rocker-turned-neuroscientist who grew up in Moraga, has delved deep into the evolutionary forces behind our brains’ ability to translate music into meaning, a development that has shaped the history of humanity in the process. Starting by age 5, he says, children can typically identify when a note is off key or a chord is out of sequence. Over time, those skills form a sort of mental rule book about music, specific to the culture in which you’re born.