Neural correlates and behavioral outcomes of aesthetic chills and their prosthetic augmentation
Félix Schoeller, Leonardo Christov-Moore, Ninette Simonian, Sam Zuzick, Yaya Shi, Abhinandan Jain, Adam Horowitz, Velu Prabhakar Kumaravel, Ben Zhang, Micah Johnson, Mihir Nath, Nicco Reggente
September 13, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/9pu3c_v1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational EEG study with an exploratory thermal augmentation manipulation |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 103 |
| Population | Adults listening to validated chill-inducing music |
| Key findings | Aesthetic chills were marked by attenuated theta power, elevated gamma power, and increased complexity, and predicted self-transcendent phenomenology in a graded fashion but not prosocial behavior or schema change. The chills-locked neural signature, not the chills themselves, predicted prosocial and schema outcomes, with distinct complexity measures tracking distinct outcome families. The authors argue chills may be a partially neuro-mimetic analogue of the psychedelic state. |
Abstract
Aesthetic chills, psychogenic shivers elicited by emotionally charged stimuli such as music, offer a neurophysiological marker bridging subjective experience and measurable physiology. Although neuroimaging has localized chills to reward and interoceptive circuits and behavioral work has linked them to prosocial outcomes, their electrophysiological signature and its relationship to psychological change remain poorly characterized, precluding comparison with phenomenologically similar states induced by other means (e.g., psychedelics). Here we recorded 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG; n = 103) during validated chill-inducing music and examined spectral and complexity-based signatures of chills, their relationships to self-transcendence, psychological insight, emotional breakthrough, and prosocial behavior, and whether augmenting peripheral chill sensations with a custom thermal prosthesis modulates neural activity, phenomenology, and behavior. Chills carried a spatially distributed signature of attenuated theta power, elevated gamma power, and convergent increases across four independent complexity measures. Chills predicted self-transcendent phenomenology in a graded fashion across binary, frequency, and intensity operationalizations, yet predicted neither prosocial behavior nor schema change; both were instead predicted by the chills-locked neural signature, with distinct complexity measures tracking distinct outcome families. Thermal augmentation left the behavioral incidence of chills unchanged; in exploratory mediation models, however, it shifted chills-specific dynamics toward criticality and away from undifferentiated entropy, linking embodied augmentation to phenomenological, affective, prosocial, and schema outcomes. Aesthetic chills may therefore constitute an at least partially neuro-mimetic analogue of the psychedelic state, sharing its elevated signal diversity and a theta attenuation concordant with recent psilocybin electrophysiology, while gamma correspondence and the absence of psychedelic-typical alpha suppression remain unresolved.