The Shiver Starts Before the Song Gets There

The song starts, and you know this one.

The first verse is easy, familiar furniture. You could hum it in your sleep. Somewhere around the second chorus, though, something in you starts leaning forward, because you know what's coming. The key change. The choir coming in. The one long note the singer holds a breath longer than seems possible.

Here it comes.

And there it is. A prickle at the back of the neck, the arms going to gooseflesh. A shiver, with nothing cold in the room.

Some people get these often and some hardly ever. Researchers in Montreal once looked at what happens in the brain at that exact moment, using songs the listeners brought in themselves because those songs did it to them every time. At the shiver, the brain's reward system was busy, the same system that answers to a good meal or good news. No surprise there.

The surprise was the part before. In the seconds leading up to the shiver, while the listener was still waiting for it, a different part of that same system was already at work. The pleasure had started on the way up.

The good part of a song begins before it arrives. Knowing it's coming is a pleasure of its own.

Which may be why that second chorus feels the way it does. The pleasure has already begun.