Looking for Spinoza

Antonio Damasio tries to find a physical reason for Bocelli mania in "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain." Check it out:

"Whether the participant is experiencing the pleasures of eating chocolate or the insane feeling of romantic love, the guilt of Clymenestra, or the excitement of erotic film excerpts, the key areas targeted in our experiments experience significant changes... There is an intimate and telling three-way connection between certain kinds of music, feelings of either great sorrow or great joy, and the body sensations we describe as "chills" or "shivers" or "thrills." For curious reasons, certain musical instruments, particularly the human voice, and certain musical compositions, evoke emotive states that include a host of skin responses such as making the hair stand on end, producing shudders, and blanching the skin. Perhaps nothing is more illustrative for our purposes than evidence from a study conducted by Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre. The wanted to study neural correlates of pleasurable states caused by listening to music capable of evoking chills and shivers down the spine. The investigators found those correlates in the somatosensing regions of the insula and anterior cingulate, which were significantly engaged by musically thrilling pieces. Moreover, the investigators correlated the intensity of the activation with the reported thrill of the pieces. They demonstrated that the activations were related to the thrilling pieces (which individual participants handpicked) and not to the mere presence of music. Curiously, on other grounds, it is suspected that the appearance of chills is caused by the immediate availability of endogenous opiods in the brain modified by these feelings."