Short Stuff: Goosebumps

Goosebumps are a pretty cool evolutionary holdover from our earlier days as furry beasts. Don't believe us? Listen in. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and Jerry's pretending that she's Dave c right now,
and that makes this a short stuff about Chuck. Goose Bumps.
All those R. L. Stein fans out there are going
to be very disappointed. In a second. Those were below
my age range. Same here. Those came along after we left,

(00:27):
right after we left Childhood. Yeah, definitely. Um, But I
have to say, if you've been on Netflix and you're
looking for something scary, slashery to watch, but that's also
really smart, that same dude came up with something called
Fear Street. Um. It's like three part series, really really
well done. Um, and it is not meant for kids

(00:48):
at all, Like it is super gory, super graphic. Just
it's like it's almost like carl Stein was like, I'm
so super writing for kids, and it just went the
opposite direction. So it's definitely worth watching. Anyone on a
murder spree. Yeah pretty much, man, it's really good. They
shot some of those goose bumps and right around our neighborhoods.
That's great man. Did you sell them? Um? Bloody Caesar's

(01:13):
very funny, So let's start talking about goose bumps, the
real goose bumps um, which is also known as pilo erection. Well,
I guess somebody had to say it. Uh, nothing funny
about that word, though, right, kind it's kind of funny, okay. Uh? Yeah.
Goose bumps are obviously an evolutionary holdover. And I can't

(01:36):
believe we haven't talked about this before, but have we
in just in some random yep? I think it's either
that or we did like a video explainer on it
or something. I know I did it. Don't be dumb,
but that's not that's not it. You and I have
talked about it before too. All right, Well should we
just tell people to go watch you don't be dumb
and sign off? No, no, no, because this is gonna

(01:56):
be way better than that. Don't be dumb? Okay? Uh? Well,
goose bumps are evolutionary hold over. Uh and you know,
sort of the and I think a lot of people
know this, but one of the things that happens when
you get goose bumps is ideally you have a little
tiny hair standing on end um. You can also get
goose bumps where there is no hair, but again, evolutionary

(02:19):
holdover from when we were all much more furry individuals.
And you call that pilow direction, and that's because it
is uh, the pilo erector muscles that are contracting and
making Uh. If you do have hair, stand on in
and took took when you had much more hair, stand
on in. Yeah, or like you said, if you don't

(02:39):
have hair, it's just like this kind of raised you
look like a pluck goose in that that um area,
which I just realizes why they call it goosebumps. You
didn't know that, are you kidding? It was one of
those things like it just never stopped and thought about it.
I've heard people say chicken skin too. Yeah, that makes
total sense as well. But so the second function you mentioned,

(02:59):
the first one is to keep us warm. The second
one was that if we were scared back in the
day when we had a lot more hair, or let's
say other animals that get goose bumps um and it
makes their hair stand on end. It makes them appear
bigger to a predator. So let's say fight or flight response,
which is appropriate because it's part of the sympathetic nervous system.

(03:21):
Goose bumps are but chuck. There's something really unique about
goose bumps. As far as sympathetic nervous system stuff goes, it's,
from what anyone can tell, the only sympathetic nervous response
that can be consciously controlled. It's extremely rare, but they
found that some people can give themselves goose bumps. It's

(03:42):
pretty awesome talent. As far as the you know, the
evolutionary holdover, I don't think we said that it keeps
us warm because it raises that hair up, and what
happens is air gets trapped in that space between right
is uh davemat Piece would say that, Dave Matthews, we

(04:02):
would you do that to everybody? I don't even like
Dave Matthews. I'm I'm not even sure how I know
that song. Well, I mean he's he's got a few
hits under his belt for sure, and I guess that's
one of them. Uh, So that'll help keep you warm.
And as far as the puffing up to appear bigger like,
you still see this all over the place in the
animal kingdom. Um, whether or not you're a dog barges

(04:24):
in on your cat and your cat puffs puffs up.
It's always funny looking when a cat puffs that tail
and body up. To try to appear you know, like
half an inch bigger than they really are all over.
But it's not just cats. You see all kinds of
animals that'll that'll puff up there for or feathers, because
birds do kind of the same thing. Yeah, totally. And
the whole thing is like, leave me alone. I'm way

(04:45):
bigger than you thought, run away. Just don't even test me, right,
but don't think about it, buddy. So that makes them
totally useless in humans, like because we don't have enough
hair to warm ourselves and we don't have enough hair
to appear any bigger. So, like you said, kept calling
it an evolutionary holdover. But what's really interesting about goose
bumps is somehow, some way along the way, as humans

(05:10):
developed more and more consciousness and intelligence and our brains
just kept evolving, something happened to where our goose bump
response got hijacked when we hear certain emotionally evocative things. Yeah,
like if you've ever been at a live concert and

(05:31):
gotten chills because something was so overwhelming emotionally, Yeah, like
the dude from Boston like just really delivered an amazing
drum solo. Uh wow, Okay, I didn't that's funny. Out
of all the people in Boston, I didn't see going
towards the drummer. Oh, he had the greatest afro of
all time. Of the original guy, Yeah, Barry I think, Yeah,

(05:54):
I can't remember his name, but yeah, he had a
fantastic affro. You know, all those guys went to M
I T. I didn't know all of them, Did I
know Tom Schultz did? I'm pretty sure all of them did,
because Schultz was the guitar genius who kind of built
a bunch of equipment along the way, and very technically
minded guy and very kind of creepy and sad. What
happened to the lead singer? Oh? I don't know about that.

(06:15):
You'll have to tell me um later on. Yeah, yeah,
this is a shorty, so you can just google that
if you're interested in people. So should we take a break?
I guess yeah sure. I think we kind of buildup
a cliffhanger, like why what happened? Like what how did
our our goose bumps get hijacked? For when something emotional happened,
specifically when we're at a live concert watching Boston. Yeah,

(06:36):
and did they all go to M I T? And
we'll find all this out right after this? All right,

(07:03):
so there's a guy. Uh, well, there's been a few
studies about this before we get to the guy. There
was a study in January in Biological psychology, and a
big shout out to Jennifer Walker Journey of postal works
dot com for the help with this. But uh, they
did a test where they basically said, hey, let's see

(07:23):
what kind of goose bumps, what they called subjective chills
we could get out of people if we sit them
down and introduce them or at least let them here
certain musics, and they chose a couple. I'm sure they
chose a bunch, but the two highlighted here are Saline
Dion's My Heart Will Go On and they called it
a chill ratio of f and a pilo or p

(07:46):
low erection ratio of fourteen percent. So four like goose
bumps of fourteen percent. Not not bad. Four of the
participants got goose bumps listening to that song, right, I
think that's what that means. Yeah, but what's next. What's
next is it's not even fair. They brought out the
big guns and they dropped purple rain on everybody. Not bad,

(08:06):
and unsurprisingly Purple Rain scored a one chill ratio. Every
single person in that study listening to Purple ring Head
shivers up and down their spine, and half got goose bumps.
And I can tell you the exact moment in that
song when everyone got chills and goose bumps, when Prince
starts whaling at the end, Honey, I know, I know,

(08:27):
I know, um vocally whaling or guitar whaling, vocally whaling
when he comes in and joins like his guitar and
it actually it just kind of comes out of nowhere,
but it fits so perfectly. And that actually really jibes
with research that a lot of um, a lot of
the things that give us goose bumps or chills down
our spine are when some sort of solo vocal or

(08:49):
instrument emerges from a more complex musical background. And that's
about as good an example of that as you're gonna find. Yeah,
And that to me is like a really cool thing.
Is Uh. There's this guy named Mitchell Culver who I
don't know I how stuff works. Got in touch with him.
They used to do interviews and stuff, but he was
an instructor. May still be at Utah State university, and

(09:11):
he studied a lot of this stuff and basically said,
you know, you have and and he put it very
simplistically by saying like you have two brains essentially, but
he he broke it down into thinking like you have
your sort of emotional brain and then you're sort of
rational thinking brain, and your emotional brain is still that
sort of uh, you know, evolutionarily wired took took brain

(09:34):
and it's it's still you know, even though we're walking
around in modern society, it's still sort of always aware
and looking out for anything that might be a bad
thing for you, whether it's a threat or a hole
in the sidewalk, or like you when you were a kid,
you'd walk into a room and identify the weapons like
you were Jason bod or something like that. Right, So

(09:55):
the thing is, while you're constantly looking for those threats, um,
eventually you mine one once in a while, or you
think you do UM Because we're still wired to be
worried about the the original threats that were a problem
for humans and then our animal ancestors. So very often
when we see something, we're startled or we we perceive

(10:15):
it as a threat with our emotional brain after a
beat or so, when our thinking brain are more evolved,
conscious brain comes in and analyzes situations like calm down,
calm down, it's not even a threat, and that after
that point there's attention that was built up that's now
released and it usually kind of feels pretty good. So

(10:36):
Culvert has linked that to why we would get goose
bumps or the chills with music, and I think it's
a good theory. My problem with this, at least in
this article is it's presented as if like this is done,
We've done all the research and this is the answer
we we know now, and that's absolutely not the case.
Like this is a this is a theory. It's a hypothesis.

(10:57):
It is a good one, but it's not. It's not
that's it, Like everyone just agrees that that's what's going
on now. I completely agree. Um, And you know you
mentioned the fact that like a uh, sort of harmonies
coming out of nowhere, or when Prince's voice s melds
with that guitar solo or something that is sort of
the unexpected thing that can draw the or I guess

(11:21):
build a bridge between the two brains as far as
Culver is concerned. Uh and The key of it all though,
is in in modern humans, like getting those pleasurable goose bumps,
and not because you're like afraid or something, is because
you actually get a dopamine hit when you're getting that
aesthetic uh set of goose bumps. Yes, But Culver and
people who subscribed to this hypothesis I think are putting

(11:44):
like the cart before the horse, because they're saying, when
your brain resolves that it's not actually an issue, you
get a dump of dopamine. I think the dopamine comes
from something else. I don't think that's necessarily what it is,
because I think you can be surprised, startled, and then
you know, realize you you were. You know that's that's

(12:05):
actually not a deadly spider, it's a Fisher Price little person.
You don't get like some dump of dopamine over that. Um.
So I think that there's something else too, and it
seems to be specifically coming from again, an emotionally evocative
song or seen in a movie or something like that,
and it has to be a certain kind of emotion too.
Anger doesn't necessarily do it. It's usually something sad or

(12:28):
something deeply like romantic, or something really hopeful just something
something that's not like just like negative through and through
interesting because I feel like I get chill bumps, like
in a movie more when it's like sort of a
chilling reveal of something and I'm like, oh my gosh,
that's what was going on that kind of thing. Okay, Well,

(12:50):
that would definitely drive with Culver's hypothesis that it's that
you anticipate one thing, or your brain thinks of one thing.
When it changes your your emotional brain gets scared. It's
a threat because, as he points out, like our our
emotional brain there's no such thing as a pleasant surprise
to it, and so when it gets startled, we're afraid.
And then our thinking brain comes in it's like no, no,

(13:10):
it's beautiful music. Um. Again, it's a good hypothesis. I
don't necessarily subscribe to the whole thing. But it doesn't
seem like he's just you know, pulled this out of
his hat and like that's it. Like he's definitely tested
it and written papers on it and all of that.
It's just not settled, I guess, is what I'm trying
to say. Like I saw another another hypothesis by guy

(13:32):
Um named Jock J. A. K. Pond skip Um, which
is a wonderful name, and they wrote a study in
two thousand eleven and their hypothesis was that um that
that solo voice like Prince wailing at the end of
of Purple Rain or like a really great you know
oboe solo emerging out of nowhere because he's expecting that

(13:55):
right that that it mimics a separation call, and that
it riggers that sense of loss. That um that is
just completely ingrained in us from the you know, millions
of years of natural history that we're tuned to listen
out for that, and that that's what's what's triggering that
that chill or that response. I like that. I like
that one too. I think I'm out. Oh yeah, are

(14:19):
you on the Jack Pan Skip train? Yeah? I think so.
I've got nothing more. Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay, great,
all right, Well then that's it for short stuff. Okay,
we're out. Stuff you should know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

(14:41):
listen to your favorite shows.