Goosebumps are one of those things, like the taste of your own spit or those weird noises your belly makes after you eat spicy food, that is so intrinsically part of our bodies you kind of forget how weird it is. But it is, right? You get a bit cold, or creeped out, and your body reacts by going all bumpy? What’s the point in that?
Well, it’s actually quite interesting.
What are goosebumps, anyway?
If you’re a doctor, or just kind of a nerd, you’ll know the phenomenon not as “goosebumps”, but as “cutis anserine” – it may sound smart, but it’s literally just Latin for “goose skin”, so evidently the medical crowd aren’t as fancy as they pretend. Alternatively, there’s “horripilation”, or the somewhat spicier “piloerection”, which references the arrector pili muscles – the tiny, smooth muscles that control hair follicles and are, therefore, responsible for the reaction.
The little bumps that define the condition are, quite simply, the result of those follicles standing on end. The reasons why that happens are many: the classic “being cold”, or even those psychogenic shivers some people get when they experience particularly moving music, images, or even ASMR. Then, of course, there’s the goosebumps you get from being scared – hence the eponymous series of books – or, ah, otherwise aroused.
One thing common to all those reasons, though, is that they’re involuntary. That’s because goosebumps are a response of your sympathetic nervous system – that is, your fight-or-flight response. That may not seem right – why would your emergency panic mode kick in just because you saw a particularly beautiful sunset, after all? – but here’s the thing: your body doesn’t really care what emotion you’re feeling; all it knows is that your brain is sending out a flood of chemical signals. The result: goosebumps.
Who gets goosebumps?
So, goosebumps are caused by hair-raising experiences – and that should clue you in as to who gets them. Nearly all mammals experience a form of this phenomenon, and you know exactly when, too: just think about an angry cat, fluffing its fur up as it spits at a rival, or the undisputed champ of piloerection, the porcupine.
That’s not the only reason animals experience piloerection. As we pointed out already, we mostly associate goosebumps with getting cold – that’s because, for our longer-haired cousins in the tree of life, the reaction is actually a really smart way of warming up.
The effect is immediate – once the hairs are erect, air gets trapped between them, adding a layer of insulation – but it’s also long-term. “When the cold lasts, [piloerection] becomes a nice mechanism for the stem cells to know it’s maybe time to regenerate new hair coat,” explained Yulia Shwartz, first author of the 2020 study that revealed this subtler role of goosebumps. “It’s a two-layer response.”
The GOAT of goosebumps: porcupines use the same reflex to raise their quills when under threat.
Image credit: teekaya/Shutterstock.com
Given the name – goosebumps – it might not be too surprising that many birds also experience this reaction, or at least a variation on it. Feathers, like hair, sprout from follicles connected to smooth muscle – and, like mammals, some birds do indeed “fluff up” in response to perceived threats or changes in the environment.
“If you kept a parakeet at some time in your life, you are familiar with their fluffing up their feathers,” notes Ornithology.com. “The bird will also fluff up when it is ill, to avoid losing body heat. And that’s what you see in the wild most – birds sitting on a branch in the winter, appearing to be twice their normal size. They piloerect their feathers to produce air spaces between them for insulation.”
“Birds can also lose heat to cool themselves by fluffing their feathers even farther out so that the air reaches the skin,” the site points out. “Birds have no sweat glands, so they can only lose heat from their respiratory system by respiration or off their skin that they expose by piloerection.”
Perhaps less obvious, though, is the fact that some reptiles also experience piloerection. In their case, the things that stand on end are the scales – which is quite intriguing, as it implies that hair, feathers, and scales all evolved from the same ancient structure. Neat, huh?
What’s the point of goosebumps?
So, for animals at least, goosebumps are really useful: they warm you up, they cool you down, and they make you look less edible. But for humans, with our suit of much shorter hair, none of those really apply. So why do we get goosebumps?
Well, the answer is… “we just do,” more or less. “For us humans, it really doesn’t do anything to protect us,” Amy Paller, the chair of dermatology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told Live Science in 2022. Like our tailbones or wisdom teeth, it’s what’s called vestigial – a relic of something our ancestors needed, but we don’t.
But while that may seem pointless and annoying, it’s actually kind of cool. It’s because of this uselessness as a survival mechanism that we get to enjoy goosebumps, explained Mitchell Colver, an instructor of special topics at Utah State University.
“To better understand goosebumps, you have to understand that you have two brains – the emotional brain and the thinking brain – and they respond differently to things going on around you,” he told HowStuffWorks last year.
“To your emotional brain, there’s no such thing as a pleasant surprise,” he explained. “So, when there are sounds in the environment, including musical sounds, the emotional brain doesn’t process it as music. It hears a person scream. It hears a high violin in a certain frequency and thinks it’s a threatening noise.”
Pretty quickly, though, the “thinking” brain kicks in, hurriedly letting the body know that it’s not a threat, it’s just Rachmaninoff. It hits the “all clear” signal, releasing tension – and sending out a sweet dopamine hit to make up for the inconvenience. “That’s why, for humans, goosebumps are pleasurable,” Colver said.
And when he says pleasurable, he means it.
“We know that dopamine is flooding the same place of the brain that is flooded when a person orgasms,” he pointed out. “So, the fact that it’s called skin orgasm is scientifically appropriate.”
“When you think about it, an orgasm is a release following a great deal of tension,” he added. “I don’t think a lot of people realize that the joy of tension is the release. And great music creates and resolves psychological tension.”
Source Link: Goosebumps Aren't Just A Human Thing. What Else Gets Them, And Why?
