Neuroscientist: 3 tips for finding songs that give your brain a physiological and emotional boost

It turns out Pharrell isn’t the only musician who can make you “happy.”

A new playlist made in collaboration with speaker-maker Sonos is designed to measurably improve your mood by leaning into cold, hard science. The playlist, dubbed Now That’s What I Call Dopamine Daydreams, features 15 songs from artists ranging from SZA to Miles Davis.

It was curated by Indre Viskontas, who in addition to holding a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience has a Masters of Music degree.

Her goal was to induce a feeling called “the chills”” with the music she selected. It’s a psychological-slash-emotional reaction driven by the neurotransmitter dopamine, she explains to CNBC Make It, and is involved in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain.

“You kind of get this feeling of either warmth or cold going through your body. Sometimes you get what feels like the hairs standing up on your arms or the back of your neck,” she says. “You kind of get this wave of a physical sensation washing over you.”

And it’s not just a feeling: it’s measurable too. Researchers “can look inside the brain and see exactly what’s happening in terms of your neurochemicals, your brain activity” when you get the chills, she tells Make It. This, coupled with measuring a person’s heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate and perspiration can pinpoint when the chills is happening.

People who grew up loving and enjoying music are more likely to have these connections and experience a physical reaction to the music they listen to, Viskontas says. 

“When we look at the brains of people who get the chills compared to people who don’t get the chills, we see a very tight connection between sort of the hearing regions of the brain and the emotional centers of the brain,” she says.

If you’re looking to craft a chills-inducing playlist for yourself, keep these three tips in mind:

• How’s your tempo? Though it might seem counterintuitive, slow tempo music is more likely to give you the chills than uptempo music. “There’s often a long anticipation phase and a buildup of tension in the music,” Viskontas says of ballads. “And the chills happen when there’s a release of tension like a beat trop or some kind of modulation or change.” 
• Embrace the power ballad: Songs that feature a “wail” may be more effective in triggering the chills than others. According to Viskontas, researchers think that this might be because the sound mimics the distress cry of a baby, which humans are hardwired to react to. “That can happen in a guitar solo or Whitney Houston’s ‘I will Always Love you’ or with an Adele song the way she modulates her voice,” she says. 
• Listen to music, don’t just play it: You can’t just trigger the chills on command by putting on a certain song, Viskontas says. Playing music in the background while you do your chores isn’t enough to get you in the right headspace. Instead, you need to sit down, focus and have an active listening session. “It’s when you’re really focusing on the emotions behind what the singers are singing about and you’re connecting that with your own feelings and thoughts,” she says. “That’s when you’re going to get the chills.”

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