Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Goosebumps

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Goosebumps are a pretty cool evolutionary holdover from our earlier days as furry beasts. Don't believe us? Listen in. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's pretending that she's Dave C right now and that makes this a short stuff about Chuck Goosebumps. All those RL Steinfans out there are going to be very disappointed in a second. Those were below my age range. Same here. Those came along after we left, right?

After we left childhood. Yeah, definitely. But I have to say, if you've been on Netflix and you're looking for something scary, slashery to watch, but that's also really smart, that same dude came up with something called Fear Street. Okay. It's a three-part series, really, really well done and it is not meant for kids at all. It is super gory, super graphic.

It's almost like RL Stein was like, I'm so sick of writing for kids and then just went the opposite direction. So it's definitely worth watching. Anyone on a murder spree? Yeah, pretty much, man. It's really good. They shot some of those Goosebumps right around our neighborhoods. That's great, man.

Did you sell them bloody Caesars? Very funny. So let's start talking about Goosebumps. The real Goosebumps, which is also known as pillow erection. Well, I guess somebody had to say it. Nothing funny about that word though, right? It's kind of funny. Okay.

Yeah, Goosebumps are obviously an evolutionary holdover and I can't believe we haven't talked about this before. We have. Have we in just in some random, yep. I think it's either that or we did like a video explainer on it or something. I know I did a don't be dumb, but that's not it. You and I have talked about it before too. All right.

Well, should we just tell people to go watch a don't be dumb and sign off? No, no, no. Because this can be way better than that don't be dumb. Okay. Well, Goosebumps are an evolutionary holdover and I think a lot of people know this, but one of the things that happens when you get Goosebumps is ideally you have a little tiny hair standing on end. You can also get Goosebumps where there is no hair, but again, evolutionary holdover

from when we were all much more furry individuals and you call that pillow erection and that's because it is the pillow erect or muscles that are contracting and making. If you do have hair, stand on end and took took when you had much more hair, stand on end. Yeah. Or like you said, if you don't have hair, it's just like this kind of raised, you look like a plucked goose in that area, which I just realized is why they call it Goosebumps. You didn't know that?

Are you kidding? It was one of the things like it just never stopped and thought about it. I've heard people say chicken skin too. Yeah. That makes total sense as well, but so the second function you mentioned the first one is to keep us warm. The second one was that if we were scared back in the day when we had a lot more hair or let's say other animals that get Goosebumps and it makes our hair stand on end, it makes

them appear bigger to a predator. So it's a fight or flight response, which is appropriate because it's part of the sympathetic nervous system Goosebumps are. But Chuck, there's something really unique about Goosebumps as far as sympathetic nervous system stuff goes. It's from what anyone can tell the only sympathetic nervous response that can be consciously controlled. It's extremely rare, but they found that some people can give themselves Goosebumps. It's pretty awesome.

Yeah. It's a good talent. It totally is. As far as the, you know, the evolutionary holdover, I don't think we said that it keeps us warm because it raises that hair up and what happens is air gets trapped in that space between, as Dave Matthews would say, Dave Matthews, why would you do that to everybody? I don't even like Dave Matthews. I'm not even sure how I know that song.

Well, I mean, he's got a few hits under his belt for sure. I guess that's one of them. So that'll help keep you warm. And as far as the puffing up to appear bigger, like you still see this all over the place in the animal kingdom, whether or not you're a dog barges in on your cat and your cat puffs up. It's always funny looking when a cat puffs that tail and body up for sure to try to appear, you know, like half an inch bigger than they really are all over, right?

But it's not just cats. You see all kinds of animals that'll, that'll puff up their fur or feathers because birds do kind of the same thing. Yeah, totally. And the whole thing is like, leave me alone. I'm way bigger than you thought. Run away. Just don't even test me.

Right? Yeah. Don't think about it, buddy. So that makes them totally useless in humans. Like because we don't have enough hair to warm ourselves and we don't have enough hair to appear any bigger. So like you said, kept calling it an evolutionary holdover. But what's really interesting about goosebumps is somehow, some way along the way, as humans

developed more and more consciousness and intelligence and our brains just kept evolving, something happened to where our goosebumps response got hijacked when we hear certain emotionally evocative things. Yeah. Like if you've ever been at a live concert and gotten chills because something was so overwhelming emotionally. Yeah. Like the dude from Boston like just really delivered an amazing drum solo.

Wow. Okay. That didn't, that's funny out of all the people in Boston. I didn't see going toward the drummer. Oh, he had the greatest afro of all time. Oh, the original guy? Yeah. Barry, I think.

Yeah. Oh, I can't remember his name, but yeah, he had a fantastic afro. Do you know all those guys went to MIT? I didn't know all of them did. I know Tom Schultz did. I'm pretty sure all of them did because Schultz was the guitar genius who kind of built a bunch of equipment along the way and very technically minded guy. Yeah, for sure.

And very kind of creepy and sad what happened to the lead singer. Oh, I don't know about that. You'll have to tell me later on. Yeah, yeah. This is a shorty, so you can just Google that if you're interested people. So should we take a break, I guess? Yeah, sure. I think we kind of built up a cliffhanger.

Like what happened? How did our goosebumps get hijacked for when something emotional happened, specifically when we're at a live concert watching Boston? Yeah. And did they all go to MIT? We'll find all this out right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

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It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. There's a skyline drive in the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so there's a guy, well, there have been a few studies about this before we get

to the guy. There was a study in January 2011 in biological psychology and a big shout out to Jennifer Walker Journey of HowStuffWorks.com for the help of this. But they did a test where they basically said, hey, let's see what kind of goosebumps, what they called subjective chills we could get out of people if we sit them down and introduce them or at least let them hear certain musics. And they chose a couple. Well, I'm sure they chose a bunch, but the two highlighted here are Saline Deans.

My heart will go on. And they call it a chill ratio of 50% and a pillow erection ratio of 14%, like goosebumps of 14%. Not bad. 14% of the participants got goosebumps listening to that song, right? I think that's what that means. Yeah. But what's next?

What's next is it's not even fair. They brought out the big guns and they dropped Purple Rain on everybody. Yeah. Not bad. And unsurprisingly, Purple Rain scored a 100% chill ratio. Every single person in that study listening to Purple Rain had shivers up and down their spine and half got goosebumps. And I can tell you the exact moment in that song when everyone got chills and goosebumps,

when Prince starts wailing at the end. Honey, I know, I know, I know. Vocally wailing or guitar wailing? Yeah, yeah. When he comes in and joins like his guitar and it actually, it just kind of comes out of nowhere, but it fits so perfectly. And that actually really jibes with research that a lot of, a lot of the things that give us goosebumps or chills down our spine are when some sort of solo vocal or instrument

emerges from a more complex musical background. And that's about as good an example of that as you're going to find. Yeah, and that to me is like a really cool thing is there's this guy named Mitchell Culver who, I don't know if House of Works got in touch with him. They used to do interviews and stuff. But he was an instructor, may still be at Utah State University. And he studied a lot of this stuff and basically said, you know, you have, and he put it very simplistically by saying like you have two brains essentially, but he broke it down into

thinking like you have your sort of emotional brain and then your sort of rational thinking brain. Right. And your emotional brain is still that sort of, you know, evolutionarily wired, took-took brain. And it's still, you know, even though we're walking around in modern society, it's still sort of always aware and looking out for anything that might be a bad thing for you, whether it's a threat or a hole in the sidewalk.

Or like you, when you were a kid, you'd walk into a room and identify the weapons like you were Jason Bourne or something like that. Right. So the thing is, is while you're constantly looking for those threats, eventually you find one once in a while, or you think you do, because we're still wired to be worried about the original threats that were a problem for humans and then our animal ancestors. So very often when we see something, we're startled or we perceive it as a threat with our emotional brain, after a beat or so when our thinking brain, our more evolved conscious

brain comes in and analyzes situations like calm down, calm down, it's not even a threat. And that after that point, there's a tension that was built up that's now released and it usually kind of feels pretty good. So Culver has linked that to why we would get goosebumps or the chills with music. And I think it's a good theory. My problem with this, at least in this article, is it's presented as if like, this is done. Like done all the research and this is the answer we know now, and that's absolutely not the case.

Like this is a theory. It's a hypothesis. It's a good one, but it's not, it's not, that's it. Like everyone just agrees that that's what's going on. No, I completely agree. And you know, you mentioned the fact that like a sort of harmony is coming out of nowhere or when Prince's voice melds with that guitar solo or something, that is sort of the unexpected thing that can draw the, or I guess, build a bridge between the two brains.

As far as Culver's concerned, and the key of it all though is in modern humans, like getting those pleasurable goosebumps and not because you're like afraid or something is because you actually get a dopamine hit when you're getting that aesthetic set of goosebumps. Yes. But Culver and people who subscribe to this hypothesis, I think are putting like the cart before the horse because they're saying when your brain resolves that it's not actually an issue, you get a dump of dopamine. I think the dopamine comes from something else.

I don't think that's necessarily what it is because I think you can be surprised and startled and then, you know, realize you were, you know, that that's actually not a deadly spider. It's a Fisher Price little person. You don't get like some dump of dopamine over that. True. So I think that there's something else to it and it seems to be specifically coming from, again, an emotionally evocative song or scene in a movie or something like that

and it has to be a certain kind of emotion too. Anger doesn't necessarily do it. It's usually something sad or something deeply like romantic or something really hopeful. Just something that's not like just like negative through and through. Interesting because I feel like I get chill bumps like in a movie more when it's like sort of a chilling reveal of something where I'm like, oh my gosh, that's what was going on, that kind of thing. Okay.

Well, that would definitely jive with Culver's hypothesis that it's that you anticipate one thing or your brain thinks of one thing when it changes, your emotional brain gets scared. Oh, it's a threat because as he points out, like our emotional brain, there's no such thing as a pleasant surprise to it. And so when it gets startled, we're afraid. And then our thinking brain comes in as like, no, no, that's beautiful music. Again, it's a good hypothesis. I don't necessarily subscribe to the whole thing, but it doesn't seem like he's just

pulled this out of his hat and like, that's it. He's definitely tested it and written papers on it and all of that. It's just not settled, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Like I saw another hypothesis by a guy named Jock, J-A-K, Ponskep, which is a wonderful name. And they wrote a study in 2011 and their hypothesis was that that solo voice like Prince Whaling at the end of Purple Rain or like a really great, you know, oboe solo emerging out of nowhere because he was expecting that, right?

Nobody. And it mimics a separation call and that it triggers that sense of loss that is just completely ingrained in us from the millions of years of natural history that we're attuned to listen out for that. And that that's what's triggering that chill or that response. I like that. I like that one too. I think I'm out.

Oh yeah, are you on the Jock Ponskep train? Yeah, I think so. I got nothing more. Oh, oh, I see what you're saying. Okay, great. All right. Well, then that's it for short stuff. Okay.

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