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She often found herself wide awake: For an account of the essential place that sleep has in our lives and why we are not getting enough, and what to do about it, see: Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep. New York: Scribner, 2017.
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Videos of caregiving acts: A year out of graduate school, in 1990, I read a short story by John Updike in the New Yorker, “Tristan and Iseult,” my first encounter with a literary portrayal of ASMR. In the story, the narrator gets his molars, “corrupt wrecks just barely salvaged from the ruin of his years of unthinking consumption,” cleaned by a dental assistant, working with gloves in an AIDS era. Through the assistant’s fleshy touches and close inspection, hovering, gazing intently, only inches away, the narrator feels seen, forgiven, known, even spiritual. The intimacy they share during the dental visit is “like something from a supermarket tabloid or a Harlequin romance”; he notes that “her spirit intertwined with his.” Updike, John. “Tristan and Iseult.” New Yorker, December 3, 1990.
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originate in bodily sensations: For an excellent line of work on our bodily maps of emotion, see Nummenmaa, Lauri, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari K. Hietanen. “Bodily Maps of Emotions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 2 (2014): 646–51. Bud Craig has devoted his career to understanding how our subjective experience of emotion arises in bodily sensations and discovered how such embodiment involves the anterior insular cortex. Craig, A. D. How Do You Feel?: An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. One of the early and influential statements about embodiment was made by George Lakoff, a linguistics and philosophy professor at Berkeley. He suggested that our metaphorical tendencies, so prominent in how we understand the world, often arise out of bodily experiences. We talk about “waves,” “surges,” and “ebbs and flows” of emotion, to pick one example, because these metaphorical descriptions arise out of making sense of the sensations associated with emotion-related shifts in cardiovascular physiology and the distribution of blood through the body. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.
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For James: James, William. “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9 (1884): 188–205.
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correlates in bodily responses: Winkielman, Piotr, Paula Niedenthal, Joseph Wielgosz, Jiska Wielgosz, and Liam C. Kavanagh. “Embodiment of Cognition and Emotion.” In APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 1, Attitudes and Social Cognition, edited by Mario Mikulincer, Philip R. Shaver, Eugene E. Borgida, and John A. Bargh, 151–75. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2015.
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shifts in your systolic blood pressure: This careful work has been carried out by Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley, who painstakingly measured systolic and diastolic blood pressure and cognitive activities like assessing risk, tracking down to the millisecond how the heart’s contraction and distribution of blood through the body (systolic blood pressure) influences perceptions of risk. Garfinkel, Sarah N., and Hugo D. Critchley. “Threat and the Body: How the Heart Supports Fear Processing.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20, no. 1 (2016): 34–46. Garfinkel, Sarah N., Miranda F. Manassei, Giles Hamilton-Fletcher, Yvo In den Bosch, Hugo D. Critchley, and Miriam Engels. “Interoceptive Dimensions across Cardiac and Respiratory Axes.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, no. 1708 (2016): 20160014. Garfinkel, Sarah N., Claire Tiley, Stephanie O’Keeffe, Neil A. Harrison, Anil K. Seth, and Hugo D. Critchley. “Discrepancies between Dimensions of Interoception in Autism: Implications for Emotion and Anxiety.” Biological Psychology 114 (2016): 117–26.
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configuration of the related emotion: Niedenthal, Paula M., Piotr Winkielman, Laurie Mondillon, and Nicolas Vermeulen. “Embodiment of Emotional Concepts: Evidence from EMG Measures.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (2009): 1120–36.
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Simply adopting the furrowed brow: Keltner, Dacher, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, and Kari Ellsworth. “Beyond Simple Pessimism: Effects of Sadness and Anger on Social Perception.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 740–52.
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sensations in your gut: For a review of the surprisingly accurate nature of such gut feelings, see: Hertenstein, Matthew. The Telclass="underline" The Little Clues That Reveal Big Truths about Who We Are. New York: Basic Books, 2013.
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The chills also arise when: Konečni, Vladimir J. “The Aesthetic Trinity: Awe, Being Moved, Thrills.” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 5 (2005): 27–44.
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“Although we read”: Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, 64.
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“Oh my god”: Vignola, Michael, and Stuart Gwynedd. “If Carl Bernstein Has Chills About the Trump Impeachment, He’s Not Saying So.” Los Angeles Magazine, October 29, 2019, https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/carl-bernstein-trump/.
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encounters with the Divine: Job 4: 12–17. King James Version (KJV).
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Within the Yogic tradition: Vasu, S. C., trans. The Gheranda Samhita: A Treatise on Hatha Yoga. Bombay: Theosophical, 1895.
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the meanings of “the chills”: Maruskin, Laura A., Todd M. Thrash, and Andrew J. Elliot. “The Chills as a Psychological Construct: Content Universe, Factor Structure, Affective Composition, Elicitors, Trait Antecedents, and Consequences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103, no. 1 (2012): 135.
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reminiscent of Dante’s hell: Ehrman, Bart D. Heaven and Helclass="underline" A History of the Afterlife. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.
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a strange and unexpected emptiness: For a terrific discussion of the eerie and the strange, read: Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Sheperton House, 2016. In this book, Fisher details distinctions between the weird (which is based in the presence of the strange) and the eerie (which is rooted in the sense of absence). Grounded in this distinction, Fisher then takes the reader on a tour of the importance of these states in the works of people like H. G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Brian Eno, and Philip K. Dick (author of the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, basis of the awe-inspiring film Blade Runner, and of whom many who live in Berkeley are proud, because he graduated from Berkeley High School in the same era as Ursula K. Le Guin).