So THAT’S why it tickles your toes!

I found out long ago, that because of the way your brain processes visual information, for instance what you read, you can literally feel – like a mirror – what the writer describes. (If they describe it well enough, of course.) It’s the way our brains work.

The sensory nervous system consists of neurons and neural pathways that respond to the senses. The mirror neuron system in the brain is a group of specialized neurons that are said to “mirror” the actions and behaviour of other neurons. The mirror neuron system is involved in the brain functions of social cognition, language, empathy, theory of mind and neuropsychiatric disorders. 

So, when you read about sadness, or happiness, you can feel it. And when the character is in danger, and the story is suspenseful, you too can feel a thrill. And, weirdly, when you read about a character who is high on drugs, you kind of feel that as well.

How you feel music

But what I didn’t know is that the same thing applies to music! Yesterday, I came across a scientific paper by researchers at the University of Turku in Finland, who wanted to document the “bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures”. The problem they addressed was:

“Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent.”

Putkinen et al, 2024, Bodily Maps of Musical Sensations Across Cultures

I’m sure you have wondered, as I have; when you listen to your favourite upbeat track, why won’t your feet stop wanting to move? And why, when you listen to a sad song, do you feel that kind of tender, hot lump in your chest? Or why do some love songs make you want to cry? How and where (and why) do you feel the emotions that the songwriter, the poet or the lyricist puts into the song?

I’m getting frissoned!

I know there is a thing called “frisson” in music – the goosebumps or chills you sometimes get when you listen to music – the ultimate aim of composers, producers and publishers when they put that elusive, hit-making hook into a song. If the hook’s good – it should give chills. The frisson response also has a neuroscience base:

“As it turns out, getting chills from music is not as common as you might think. Researchers from USC released a study that suggests that only about 50 percent of people feel things like shivers, a lump in their throat, and goosebumps when they listen to music. What’s more, those people might have very different brains than those who don’t experience those feelings.”

Reuben Westmaas, What Getting Chills from Music says About Your Brain, August 1, 2019, in Discovery.com, retrieved Jan. 31, 2024)

The frisson response is not common to everyone or frequently experienced. Other emotional responses, however, are – no matter who you are, or where you are, as the Finnish researchers have concluded.

Segue, segue, segue…

I concur with that. Long ago, I was an English teacher on the South African gold mines. The mining company that I worked for launched an intensive, fast-track program to get thousands of workers (about 21,000 by the end of the ten-year program) to about Grade 9-level English, enough to let them get critical job qualifications. To get so many people, so quickly, from English illiteracy to that level, they needed a specialized, accelerated learning and teaching method. The most radical one at that time, was called “Suggestopedia”, which was brought to the West from behind the Iron Curtain by its developer, the Bulgarian, Dr. Georgi Lozanov. (Suggestopedia has long since been replaced with other less expensive and intensive language learning methods.) Rumour had it that it had been used in East Germany to train Cold War spies to speak native-level American English very quickly.

The professors of the German Language Dept. at Stellenbosch University latched onto this method and introduced it to their students, one of whom was yours truly. And boy oh boy, did it ever work! I got straight A’s for German for the first time.

The trick with Suggestopedia was that the method involved using classical music to embed (if that’s the word) the new words and structures into the learner’s brain. The teacher had to basically sing the new language material to the tune of the classical piece that the students were listening to. If you couldn’t sing it, you could half-sing it, or “surf” it, as it was called. These double music sessions were called the First Concert and the Second Concert. I was recruited to teach English, along with my fellow trainers, by using Suggestopedia, to all these thousands of Black mine workers.

Sing me some Canon in D Min(ing)

Imagine the scene: a classroom with about 20 non-English speaking Black men, Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D playing, and me – a lil’ blonde bookworm-ish type – reading out loud a story with all sorts of mining terms in it…to the tune of Canon in D. These guys had never heard any of the classical music we used before they went on our courses.

The principle was that the music was more or less on the same frequency as pre-sleep, deep relaxation brain waves, thus lowering their mental resistance to processing new language. You know the feeling – you’re awake but kind of drifting away.

Would this method, based on European culture, work on Africans? Yep. Totally did. Like a bomb. They learned, and graduated, and got new qualifications and jobs. Some became English teachers themselves. Some of them could hum a bit of Pachelbel, Handel or Bach, as a nice spinoff.

It makes sense, therefore, that all kinds of music would evoke a physical response in listeners. This illustrates the findings of the researchers:

Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures

What’s interesting is that the East Asian and Western people who they tested in the study, felt the sensations in about the same places – feet, chest, stomach or head: “We conclude that music induces consistent bodily sensations and emotions across the studied Western and East Asian cultures. These subjective feelings were similarly associated with acoustic and structural features of music in both cultures. (Look at the bottom of this post for a link to download the pdf of the full paper.)

“These results demonstrate similar embodiment of music-induced emotions in geographically distant cultures and suggest that music-induced emotions transcend cultural boundaries due to cross-culturally shared emotional connotations of specific musical cues.”

This leads me to wonder: let’s say you’re just written a chapter of your novel. How do you know that it’s any good? That it will engage the reader? Simple. Let someone else read it. Watch whether they show any emotions, or ask them where they have any physical sensations. If not, or if they show an unexpected reaction, like laughing when they should be upset – maybe you need to work on it a bit more.

Ultimately we’re not that different from each other after all. Music really is a universal language. And this study proves it.

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Download the scientific paper here.