#piloerection

[2022dirt]

When dogs get startled or excited, the hair along their back can raise. It’s a reflex called piloerection, similar to goosebumps.

[bernar444]

Swallows in a Snowstorm by Keith Williams Via Flickr: These Tree Swallows huddling together to conserve energy and body heat, were part of a large flock of migrating swallows caught in a freak mid-May snowstorm on the Yukon River. Seen here, they were taking cover in the alders during the snowstorm.

[dtegarden]

What makes your hair stand on end?

What makes your hair stand on end?

We’ve all felt that peculiar sensation that comes with goosebumps. It might be a chilly breeze that causes your arm hairs to stand on end, or maybe a shadow in the dark that catches your imagination. Either way, goosebumps are the odd reaction we have to a variety of stimuli — but what are they exactly? And what do they have to do with geese?

        The name goosebumps, the common term for what…

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[kforourke]

Horripilation

Also known as goosebumps or goose pimples, known as willies, the shivers, jimjams, and maybe the creeps, horripilation is per Merriam-Webster’s “a bristling of the hair of the head or body (as from disease, terror, or chilliness).” The M-W medical edition’s definition of piloerection (a near synonym of horripilation, piloerection refers specifically to hair-related willies) is a bit more expansive: “involuntary erection or bristling of hairs due to a sympathetic reflex usually triggered by cold, shock, or fright or due to a sympathomimetic agent.”

What neither definition mentions is that goosebumps can also be caused by pleasure—specifically aesthetic pleasure. Nor do the definitions mention that not everyone experiences aesthetic pleasure-driven goosebumps to the same extent, or even at all.

A study by a group of researchers from Harvard and Harvard Medical school—”Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music”—published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience makes a strong case for a physiological connection between horripilation and aesthetic pleasure via music. 

Specifically, their results “from diffusion tensor imaging show that white matter connectivity between auditory perceptual regions (pSTG) and regions of the brain important for emotional and social processing (aIns, mPFC) reflect individual differences in the tendency to experience chills from music.” Score one for nature, I suppose, in the eternal battle of nature vs. nuture.

Me, I get art-goosebumps all of the time, especially from music, but also particularly well-written passages. Recent examples include the ending of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud a Solitude, which I won’t ruin but cannot recommend enough, and which I read as part of my research for a just-finished piece I wrote about Hrabal’s forthcoming memoir All My Cats. More on that later.

And then there’s the new Big Thief song, “Not.” I’m not intimately familiar with Big Thief, in part because I have a harder and harder time keeping up with music, and because their brand of “extremely serious folk rock” falls squarely into what I think of as the Leonard Cohen Bucket: excellent music that is difficult, functionally, to listen to. What, I’ve always wondered, is the proper occasion, or venue, for Cohen’s “Dress Rehearsal Rag”? Same goes for Big Thief, and “Not” in particular. It’s an intense, searing song; here are its opening lines:

It's not the energy reeling Nor the lines in your face Nor the clouds on the ceiling Nor the clouds in space

The whole song’s like this, and lead singer Adrianne Lenker delivers its lines with a growing sense of mania until, roughly three-and-a-half minutes into the song, the band breaks into a wild, sloppy, careening guitar solo that acts as a release, a release and a sort of keening, anguished yell. It’s a great solo. And every time I listen to it—like right now as I type this—all of the hair on my arms stands on end, standing and sitting as the solo hits its peaks and valleys. Thank you very much, white matter.

...

Header image via the CircaSassy flickr photostream. Pilioerection gif via Wikimedia Commons.

[newshare-blog1]

Close up of a piloerection, aka Goosebumps.

Taken from /r/gifs/

Posted by Andi via newshare.

[featherfloof]

Floof!

[scienceblogtumbler]

The curious case of the people who can control their goosebumps

The curious case of the people who can control their goosebumps

Take a moment to give yourself goosebumps. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

What’s that? You can’t control your goosebumps? No worries—not everyone can do it. But some people can.

Surprised? You’re not alone. James Heathers, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern, peruses old scientific articles as a hobby. He first discovered this weird phenomenon while reading a case study from 1938. After finding the…

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[chandarchandar]

3/5/17 #piloerection #dailysketch #pencil #watercolor #chandarchandar #latergram #rat #albino #labrat