Chills
“My childhood was one of extreme awe.” That is how Claire Tolan responds when I ask about her early experiences of awe. Her phrase makes me wonder, as do her fierce eyes and mussed-up hair.
Claire grew up in Ohio and found awe outside. She began writing at age twelve, producing volumes of poems and prose throughout her teens. She found early poetic sublimity in the words of William Carlos Williams, which led her to study poetry as a college student and then attain a PhD in information science.
Upon graduating, Claire moved to Berlin to work on an app that she described to me, in a café in that city, as “Airbnb for refugees.” Her landing in the new city, though, was rough. She felt anxious and tense. The unsettling presence of that twenty-first-century malaise—loneliness—overtook her. Her sleep was disrupted. She often found herself wide awake before dawn, her mind whirring and worrying.
Claire found comfort in ASMR. What is ASMR? If you are younger than thirty you likely already know and may have bookmarked your own diet of its digital offerings. If you are over thirty, it sounds like another mysterious acronym of a younger generation mocking your dance moves and coming to take your job.
ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. This indecipherable mouthful of words refers to a constellation of sensations in your body, including tingles in your spine, shoulders, the back of your neck, and on the crown of your head. The poet Walt Whitman was perhaps thinking of this sensation in writing about the “body electric.”
How people like Claire find ASMR is where the story gets strange. There are millions of ASMR videos online. These videos often feature a person, filmed up close, whispering and carrying out actions as if moving closer to you, the viewer. The person may make sounds of daily living—of chopping food, tapping countertops, rustling cellophane packaging, or intimate conversation. Or the tongue clicking in a moistened mouth, gentle lip smacking, the sounds of eating, and, from South Korea, a whole ASMR genre of slurping shellfish. Videos of caregiving acts in intimate spaces—dental procedures, chiropractic adjustments, or ear cleanings—can also trigger ASMR.
For Claire, experiencing ASMR soothed her anxiety; it gave her a strange sense of comfort. Of place. Even home. At the end of our conversation, I ask her what it all means. She reflects:
It is like being surrounded by the sounds from childhood. Hearing your parents talk at dinner. The clinking of silverware on plates and the wood table. It feels like when your mom comes close to say good night as you drift off to sleep. They are the sounds of being surrounded by intimacy. The first years of life. Of being embraced.
What are we to make of this possibility, that certain kinds of chills are registers of the idea of having someone you love approach you, of being surrounded by the sounds of home? The framework for an answer is found in William James’s letters to his brother Henry, the great novelist. These letters include vivid descriptions of back pains, upset stomachs, tingly veins, and bodily fatigue. The dramas in the minds of these highly sensitive brothers played out in the sensations of their bodies, and would lead William to one of his most enduring ideas: Our mental life is embodied. Our conscious experience of emotions, and the lenses through which we perceive our lives—in the case of awe, that we are part of something larger than the self—originate in bodily sensations and their underlying neurophysiology. For James, “our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame.”
Today a new science of embodiment with roots in William James’s thinking reveals that many of your most significant thoughts have correlates in bodily responses. Your perception of risk, for example, tracks shifts in your systolic blood pressure, when the heart’s quarter-second contraction sends waves of blood through your arteries. How we hold our bodies shapes the reality we perceive. It is easier to recognize concepts (e.g., “vomit”) when you move your facial muscles into the configuration of the related emotion (e.g., of disgust). Simply adopting the furrowed brow and tightened mouth of anger leads people to perceive life as more unfair (try glaring with clenched jaw while listening to a loved one and see what comes to mind). Your judgments about whether someone is trustworthy or not track sensations in your gut.
Claire Tolan’s experiences with ASMR are a poetic example of embodiment: her chills were accompanied by ideas of feeling close to her parents and being surrounded by a sense of home. This theme—that some kind of chills accompany the sense of joining with others to face the unknown—appears across history in descriptions of moments of awe and the wonders of life.
Within the arts, certain qualities of music can produce the chills, such as crescendos, high-pitched solos, expansive guitar riffs, fast drumming, and dissonant chords. The chills also arise when music brings us closer to others in a sense of shared identity.
When reading a novel or a poem, a “literary frisson”—the sudden chills in recognizing the vast forces of a plot—may ripple through our bodies. Here is Vladimir Nabokov on reading Charles Dickens’s novels: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.” As with music, the chills of literature unite us with others in grappling with the vast unknowns we face together.
We often experience the chills during epiphanies whose recognition joins us with others in common cause. At the coffee maker one day while reporting on the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein was overtaken by the chills. He turned to his colleague Bob Woodward and blurted out: “Oh my god, this president is going to be impeached.” Chills signal to our default mind that yet-to-be-recognized forces of social change are nearby—in this particular case, that the discoveries Bernstein and Woodward were unearthing would unite a movement to bring down a president.
Different kinds of chills occur with regularity in encounters with the Divine, as in this example from the book of Job:
In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face. The hair of my flesh stood up.
Within the Yogic tradition, the chills are a sign of devotional love, part of Kundalini, the feminine, ego-dissolving spiritual energy of mystical interconnectedness experienced during yoga. In the vein of Buddhist literature known as Abhidhamma, the bodily shiver is seen as a sign of ecstasy, of losing the self in relation to the Divine. If the soul is embodied, as Walt Whitman observed, the chills would seem to be one register of our recognition that we are connected to something primary, good, and larger than the self.
But what are we to make of the various meanings of “the chills”? That they accompany awe and terror? Bliss and dread? Ecstasy and horror? Union with the Divine and condemnation?
Inspired by questions like these, awe scientists have mapped the meanings of “the chills.” In one illustrative study, people wrote about an experience of the chills and then reported on the degree to which they felt four sensations—cold shivers, shudders, tingling, and goose bumps—as well as various emotions. This study would reveal that “the chills” can refer to two distinct bodily responses with very different embodied social meanings.