26/03/2026
For a long time, we believed that the shivers we feel when encountering art were due solely to sensitivity, memory, or cultural background. But what if part of this experience had also been imprinted on the body, silently, long before any conscious memory existed?
A recent study conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and published in PLOS Genetics investigated precisely what many artists know from experience: aesthetic chills, that moment when music, poetry, or an image pierces us with physical intensity.
By analyzing genetic data and emotional reports from more than 15.000 people, the researchers observed that around 30% of the variation in the tendency to experience these “shivers” is related to familial factors. What can be understood as genetic variants, from a psychotherapeutic perspective, are emotional experiences stored in the limbic system that have shaped our unique traits. In other words, the way art moves us may be, in part, connected to our childhood or even to transgenerational emotional likes and dislikes.
This finding cannot reduce the aesthetic experience to a biological formula. On the contrary, it deepens the mystery. It demonstrates that what we perceive as deeply intimate also dialogues with our bodily heritage. The shiver is not merely a metaphor:
It activates neural systems similar to those involved in processing biologically significant stimuli, such as food or survival. Art, therefore, is not superfluous. It touches on fundamental layers of our internal organization.
This also reveals intriguing nuances. Some transgenerational or early experiences that shape our preferences may be linked to the personality trait known as “openness to experience,” which is associated with aesthetic curiosity and engagement with different artistic languages. Others appear to be specific to each medium: the way someone responds to music may differ from how they respond to poetry or visual art.
This may explain why the same work can move one person to tears while leaving another speechless. It is not a matter of greater or lesser connection, but of unique modes of resonance shaped by personal or family experience. Each body listens to art through its own sensory architecture.
This study confirms something that artistic practice has always intuited: *sound organizes us*. It moves through the nervous system, modulates breathing, and alters states of consciousness. When a song gives us goosebumps, it is not just about emotion. It is body, memory, heritage, and presence in dialogue.
Part of this sensitivity is inscribed in our genes that bind us to our lineage, and all of this through experience, encounters, and shared listening. Art remains a realm of relationships. Biology does not limit it; it simply reveals that art moves us more deeply than we previously assumed.
Perhaps a shiver is nothing more than that: the moment when who we are inside recognizes something essential that resonates on the outside.
Source:
Corporaal, Anniek. Research conducted by Giacomo Bignardi and team at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Published in PLOS Genetics.
search: https://neurosciencenews.com/genetics-aesthetic-chills-30156/