Neural correlates and behavioral outcomes of aesthetic chills and their prosthetic augmentation
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.
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BibTeX
@misc{schoeller2026neural,
title = {{Neural correlates and behavioral outcomes of aesthetic chills and their prosthetic augmentation}},
author = {Felix Schoeller and Leonardo Christov-Moore and Ninette Simonian and Sam Zuzick and Yaya (Wei) Shi and Abhinandan Jain and Adam Horowitz and Velu Prabhakar Kumaravel and Ben Zhang and Micah Johnson},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/9pu3c_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9pu3c_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Neural correlates and behavioral outcomes of aesthetic chills and their prosthetic augmentation
AU - Felix Schoeller
AU - Leonardo Christov-Moore
AU - Ninette Simonian
AU - Sam Zuzick
AU - Yaya (Wei) Shi
AU - Abhinandan Jain
AU - Adam Horowitz
AU - Velu Prabhakar Kumaravel
AU - Ben Zhang
AU - Micah Johnson
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/13
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/9pu3c_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9pu3c_v1/
AB - 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.
ER -