The overall feeling is often called "frisson", and some people describe it as the feeling when you're on a swingset and it hits its peak and starts to come back down. I get literal goosebumps from some music, and some movies too, but that's probably just triggered by the soundtrack. Blade Runner 2049 and Annihilation always do it even though I've seen them almost a dozen times each.
For me it's the Charge of the Rohirrim at the battle of the Pelennor fields when Theoden makes his speech to his riders:
"Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
spear shall be shaken, shield shall be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now, ride! Ride for ruin and the world's ending!
Death! Death! Death!
Forth Eorlingas!"
The sound of The Shimmer from the trailer and in the movie (See here https://youtu.be/89OP78l9oF0?t=54) makes my skin shiver every time I hear it. Also I loved Annihilation both in book and movie form. Have you seen its spiritual predecessor, Roadside Picnic?
Of a sample of 20 people, 10 participants self-reported experiencing goosebumps when listening to music, 10 didn't; the DTI brain machine finds they have different connectivity between certain regions of the brain.
Who gets to be _the special_ out of two sets with an equal number of members? :)
I suspect the sample was chosen to get two equal sets, as for an experiment like this you want to maximise the data from the two groups, as you are not trying to measure the incidence of the effect but rather the differences from the effect.
I was already coming here to comment (even before you said this) on how this seems to rhyme with picturing something in your mind's eye, which I always grokked as being figurative speech.
I realized through my relationship with my partner and later a coworker that some people picture things with extraordinary acuity (so much so that I can trigger revolt or disgust by just describing something), but I thought they were the special ones. It wasn't until I read about Derek Parfit having aphantasia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia) that I realized I was sitting somewhere out in the long tail of human experience.
There are two axes here! Phantasia does not imply involuntary imagining! I don't imagine/picture involuntarily, and for many many years I didn't understand that most people do involuntarily imagine what they hear. Forbidden-while-eating topics are no longer a mystery to me.
My own mental model (sigh...) is that these are all roughly related to (if not literal types of) the crossover/cross-polination (sigh...) that manifests in synesthesia.
I think synesthesia is definitionally involuntary, but your statement did make me go search "voluntary synesthesia", though I'm not done reading results yet.
I would guess it's a lot harder to identify people who can electively conjure anything akin to what synesthetes experience. It probably feels less distressing or noteworthy, happens less often, and would be a lot harder to study...
While I have the conscious ability to create both images and entire 3d animated systems in my head, it also comes with my subconscious flashing images at me, from animal forms through to mandalas (sometimes combined with buzzing noises), having extremely intrusive visual memories that can be triggered unexpectedly off a host of random things, and experiencing fireworks whenever I have a migraine. I think I might be sitting in a tail somewhere too. Hi, how's your tail doing? This one is very brightly coloured but tends to move around a lot.
This is similar to a conversation I had with my wife about inner dialog. I had always considered that one's inner dialog was literally conscious thought until I learned that some don't have that at all.
I get literal goosebumps for certain songs, and it is kind of all over the place (music wise). If someone puts on Adele's Rolling in the Deep, the part where she belts out in the chorus, I always get physical goosebumps.
I never realized not everyone can do this, but I also can wiggle my ears, another useless genetic trait.
yes literally, sometimes coupled with an overwhelming rush of emotions that makes my eyes well up (doesn't have to be in a sad way, and depends on the situation and music).
I don't think I have ever experienced this. I do however experience something like the opposite: music I don't like can evoke anything from a mild sense of dread to an almost caged-animal level of irritation - a very physical level of tension I feel all over. Especially horrid are the highly repetitive songs with vapid lyrics which inevitably go on to punish me by becoming an ear-worm infection for hours on end leaving me feeling exhausted. It makes the day seem unendurably long.
I am a bit of an odd duck when it comes to music though. I often go for weeks and weeks without actively seeking out any music at all. Not that I don't like music, I do, but I don't regularly experience that need for it that so many others seem to have. But, when I am programming and need to go into hyper-focus mode, I often find fast-paced Metal is the ticket, energizing and stimulating.
