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- Music chills turn on the brain’s opioid system. This system controls pleasure and pain relief.
- If you block opioid receptors with naltrexone, it makes emotional and physical responses to music much weaker.
- Music turning on the opioid system can lower pain and make people feel better mentally without using drugs.
- Music’s emotional high points feel rewarding. This happens because they mix surprise with what you expect to hear.
- Many people everywhere get music chills. This points to a biological and evolutionary reason for why we like beauty.
Music and Opioid Release: Can Songs Relieve Pain?
For a long time, music has held people’s attention. It brings up feelings and memories like few other things can. Now, new research shows music’s power is real, not just a feeling. It works chemically. Studies show when we listen to powerful music, the brain turns on its opioid system.
This system releases natural substances. These substances change how we feel pain, make us feel good, and cause physical things like chills. This link between music and the opioid system means new things for brain science, feeling well, and even helping people with pain.
What Are Music-Induced Chills?
You’re really into a favorite song. Suddenly, your skin tingles. Goosebumps appear. You get a “shiver down the spine.” This is more than a regular feeling. It’s called frisson, or music chills. Frisson is a strong physical reaction to powerful sounds. Often, your heart beats faster, you might tear up, or feel a lump in your throat.
Experts guess that 50% to 75% of people get chills from music sometime. This happens most often with music types that focus on big feelings. Like classical music, film music, gospel, and some pop or electronic music. These types use rising volumes and strong singing well.
But frisson doesn’t happen just any time. It usually follows specific musical things like:
- Sudden key or speed changes
- Surprising harmonies or endings
- Strong emotional words or singing
- Layers of instruments or instruments getting louder
These musical features create surprise and tension. This causes strong reactions in the brain’s reward and feeling centers. What happens? You get a strong, almost joyful physical response. This comes from the same brain chemicals found with physical pleasure.
The Brain’s Opioid System: Pleasure and Pain Modulation
To understand how music causes such strong feelings, we need to look into the brain’s opioid system. Natural opioids—substances like endorphins, enkephalins, and dynorphins that your body makes—act like the brain’s own drug store. Their main jobs are:
- Changing how we feel pain
- Making us feel very happy
- Helping people feel closer to each other
- Helping the reward process during good times
Along with dopamine and serotonin, these natural opioids change how we see pain and make good feelings stronger. They work with different parts of the brain, like:
- The nucleus accumbens (important for reward and motivation)
- The insular cortex (connects to feeling and knowing yourself)
- The amygdala (handles strong feelings)
When opioids fill these areas, we feel good. And importantly, this opioid release can start because of physical things (like exercise or touch). But it can also start because of non-physical things. Like looking at powerful art or listening to music.
New Findings: Music Triggers Natural Opioid Release
In a new 2024 study from the University of Toronto, researchers led by Lévêque and others looked at the direct link between music chills and the brain’s opioid system. People in the study were asked to listen to music they said was emotionally powerful—songs they knew gave them chills.
What was different? One time, people in the study were given naltrexone. This drug blocks opioid receptors. When they took the drug, almost everyone said their emotional and physical responses to their favorite songs were much less. Chills almost never happened or didn’t happen at all. The music felt flat, without emotion.
Key Takeaways:
- People said their chills were less strong after their opioid system was blocked.
- The music felt less emotional—songs didn’t mean as much.
- People enjoyed listening less. This was seen in what they said and how their bodies reacted.
These results show that the natural opioid system is needed for music to cause chills and make you feel good. It’s not just in your head. When music moves you, your brain is reacting with chemicals.
📖 “Music-induced chills depend on natural opioid signaling,” Lévêque et al. (2024)
How Blocking Opioid Receptors Affects Music Pleasure
Imagine listening to your favorite song and feeling… nothing. That emotional climb, that perfect drop—it’s all there, but it doesn’t hit the same. That’s exactly what happened to participants after taking naltrexone.
When the body’s opioid receptors are blocked, it loses its natural way to make rewarding feelings. Hearing beautiful music went from being deeply moving to just okay or even boring. This shows the opioid system is key to why we enjoy beauty. And it also points out that many ways we connect with beauty and feelings come from simple chemical reactions in the brain.
Without opioids, music cannot “move” us. This hides important ways music can be used in the real world. Like in music therapy and helping people handle their feelings.
Music and Pain Relief: Implications in Healthcare
For many years, hospitals and clinics have used music therapy. It helps with pain, lowers worry, and makes getting better easier. Now, science shows how it does this. By starting natural opioid release, music acts like some of the brain’s own reactions to pain medicine. But it doesn’t have the bad side effects.
Music therapy has worked well for different health problems:
- Long-lasting pain (including fibromyalgia and arthritis)
- Getting better after surgery
- Stress and sickness from cancer treatment
- Settings where people are giving birth
When music you like makes the opioid system active, it can lower how much pain you feel. It can also change your heart rate and lower cortisol (the “stress hormone”).
🎼 Music isn’t just a distraction—it’s a biological action.
Doctors and nurses can use playlists made to be emotionally strong and familiar, based on what patients like. This helps get the best healing result. For people who might easily get hooked on pain medicine, especially now with the opioid crisis, this is a good way to help without drugs.
Emotional Regulation and Mental Health
Music’s link to the opioid system also helps with how you feel, not just your body. Problems like depression, anxiety, and issues from trauma often make the reward system weaker. This makes it hard for people to feel happy, wanting to do things, or connected emotionally.
Music that gives you chills might give you a specific emotional push. When we hear a powerful part that moves us, our brains react with the same chemicals that help people feel close, safe, and able to make it. This might help:
- Bring back lost interest or lack of joy (a main sign of depression)
- Help handle feelings during therapy
- Make good experiences stronger during recovery
Some therapists already use music in sessions. It helps people be in the moment, feel stable, or heal from trauma. As brain science learns more, music therapy could become a more important part of helping with mental health issues.
The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Reward
Opioids make us feel good, but they don’t work by themselves. Dopamine is also important for the reward system. It is very involved in waiting for something to happen. This means how music is built—its rhythm and whether it is predictable or not—is very important in how we react.
Gold and others wrote in 2019 that the mix of predictability and surprise is what really makes music enjoyable. When we expect something to happen—and the music is a bit different or surprising—dopamine comes out. This makes us feel a rush, like a thrill.
The dopamine and opioid systems work together in a strong cycle:
- Waiting for something new causes dopamine.
- Feeling happy and rewarded emotionally turns on opioids.
- When they work together, music makes you feel very happy.
This shows music is a complex way we learn, connect, and manage ourselves using more than one sense.
Individual Differences: Why Some People Feel Chills More Than Others
Why do some people get chills from music and others don’t? Brain scientists think it depends on brain structure and personality.
- People whose hearing parts of the brain are more connected to areas like the insula or anterior cingulate cortex usually feel stronger emotions from music.
- People who score high on being “open to new things” often get frisson chills.
- Being able to understand others’ feelings, use your imagination, and be sensitive also makes it more likely you’ll get chills.
So, if you cry during film music or get goosebumps when the key changes—you’re not being dramatic. Your brain is built in a way that responds strongly to beauty.
The Role of Expectation and Surprise in Music Pleasure
A main reason music is powerful is how it plays with what you expect. Our brains look for patterns—we like to know what’s next. But when music breaks the pattern a little and finishes in a good way, the result is joy.
People who write music often use things like:
- Ending a musical idea later than you expect.
- Changing speed after building tension.
- Adding layers of instruments.
- Changing keys or modes in a surprising way.
Each “surprise” we notice is balanced with what we expect. This expectation comes from the music type, the culture, and what the person has heard before. Getting this balance right is what makes listening a really special experience.
Cross-Cultural and Universal Insights
It’s interesting that music chills don’t just happen with Western music or people trained in music. People in different cultures have similar feelings from emotional music they haven’t heard before. This shows the biology behind enjoying music goes beyond language and how you grew up.
Experts who study music from different cultures and brain scientists think music came about as a way for groups to stick together. It helped people share feelings and even bond before they used words. This made groups better at surviving. They did this with shared rhythms and rituals.
From drums played like heartbeats to chants in temples, people have always used rhythm and sound to share feelings. This is based in biology, not just culture.
Limitations and Ethical Considerations
The research on music and the opioid system is interesting, but it has limits.
- The number of people in studies is small. Also, the results might be slanted because people who respond to music sign up for the studies.
- Lab settings can’t fully copy how people listen to music with feeling in their own lives.
- Giving drugs like naltrexone in studies brings up questions about what’s right. This is true when the drug blocks people from feeling good emotions.
In hospitals or clinics, it’s hard to draw the line between helping someone and controlling their feelings. Music’s power must be used carefully. People should not become too dependent on it or use it wrongly.
Practical Takeaways: Curating Your Own Mood-Boosting Playlist
If you want to use music to feel good, make a playlist of songs that give you chills. Look for these things:
- Songs that give you chills or bring back strong memories
- Emotional music from movies or times in your life that meant a lot
- Songs with parts that build up to a big moment or get louder
- Singing or music parts that give you goosebumps
Use your playlist on purpose. Maybe for energy in the morning, to relax when getting better, or to calm down at night. You could write down how you feel before and after listening. See if your mood or worry gets better.
Future Directions: Music, Neuroscience, and Biofeedback
As brain science and technology change, we might start seeing very exact ways to use music for healing. Tools you wear, like headbands that read brain waves or wristbands that check body signs, could help spot chills right when they happen by looking at body signals:
- How much your heart rate changes
- How your skin conducts electricity
- Seeing goosebumps with sensors
These tools could help pick music in healing settings. They could make plans just for you to help with mood, PTSD, or long-lasting pain.
Soon, doctors might give you special music playlists along with your medicine. They would use the close link between music and the opioid system to help you heal and feel better emotionally.
The Neurochemistry of Musical Joy
What people used to talk about in poems is now science: music changes our minds from the inside. Each thrill you feel when music gets bigger or the singing hits a high point is a very exact chemical reaction in your brain. Your brain lets out opioids, filling you with good feelings, comfort, and a sense of fitting in. You don’t just hear music; you feel it in your body and brain chemistry.
Learning about how music and the opioid system are linked shows us a bit about the beauty and how complex human feelings are. It supports old ways of using sound to heal. And it creates good chances for new ways to help people based on things we all feel.
So next time your favorite song gives you chills, smile—you just got a dose of nature’s own medicine.
Want to learn more about how your brain feels things, pain, and pleasure? See our newest articles on brain science and ways to feel well without drugs here on The Neuro Times.
