About 30% of Who Gets Chills From Art or Music Is Heritable, Genome Study Finds
Charles Darwin described it as a shiver down the spine while listening to music in King's College Chapel. Vladimir Nabokov, writing from a position of self-professed indifference to music, nonetheless called it the "telltale tingle" that he considered essential evidence of genuine literary quality. The phenomenon has a scientific name - aesthetic chills - and it does not happen to everyone. Researchers have long suspected that stable biological differences underlie this variability. A genome-wide study from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics now places partial genetic determination of the experience on firm statistical ground.
The research, published in PLOS Genetics and led by Giacomo Bignardi and colleagues, analyzed genetic data from more than 15,500 participants in the Lifelines cohort - a large, multi-generational study of individuals from the northern Netherlands. Participants provided information about their emotional responses to cultural experiences across music, poetry, and visual art. The researchers then examined whether and how DNA variation corresponded to individual differences in aesthetic chills frequency.
Family Influence, Genetic Component
The analysis found that approximately 30% of the variation in experiencing aesthetic chills is linked to family-level factors. This is a meaningful figure: it means individual differences in aesthetic chills are not random or purely determined by exposure and habit, but have a detectable family-linked component. The question was then how much of that family resemblance is specifically genetic versus shared environment - growing up in the same household, exposure to the same music, similar educational experiences.
The answer: roughly one quarter of the familial influence is attributable to common genetic variants - the ordinary DNA differences distributed across the population. That translates to an overall genetic contribution of around 7-8% of total variation in aesthetic chills, a modest but statistically reliable fraction. Heritability at this level is comparable to what researchers have found for other complex traits involving personality and aesthetic preferences.
Shared and Separate Genetic Pathways
The study examined chills across three artistic domains - music, poetry, and visual art - and found that the genetic architecture differs between them. Some genetic effects were shared across all three domains and were associated with personality traits, particularly openness to experience and general artistic engagement. This shared component suggests a domain-general biological predisposition: people who are broadly oriented toward aesthetic experience may be genetically prone to feeling chills across multiple art forms.
But other genetic effects appeared domain-specific. Some genetic variants associated with chills from music did not show the same relationship with poetry responses, and vice versa. This specificity suggests that different biological mechanisms - perhaps involving different sensory processing pathways or distinct emotional memory systems - shape responses to auditory versus linguistic versus visual aesthetic stimuli. The implication is that aesthetic sensitivity is not a single unified trait but a collection of partly independent capacities with both shared and separate genetic underpinnings.
Limitations Worth Noting
The Lifelines cohort is predominantly Dutch and Northern European. Whether the genetic findings replicate in populations with different ancestry, and whether the cultural specificity of which art forms produce chills affects the genetic associations, are open questions. The genome-wide association study design used here identifies statistical correlations between genetic variants and reported chills frequency; it does not identify the specific genes or biological mechanisms involved, nor does it establish that the associated variants causally produce aesthetic sensitivity. Much larger samples across diverse populations would be needed to resolve those questions.
Bignardi acknowledged this directly: "Much work remains to clarify how the genetic underpinnings of these experiences interact with environmental exposure and social dynamics." Growing up in a household where music is central, receiving musical training, and developing familiarity with specific genres and styles all influence aesthetic sensitivity - and these environmental factors interact with genetic predispositions in ways the current study was not designed to characterize.
What the study establishes is a starting point: the "telltale tingle" is not purely learned, not purely random, and not purely a matter of cultural conditioning. Part of who experiences it, and how readily, appears to be written - in modest but measurable proportion - into DNA.