Gabe Turow

Q. What is the biological or chemical explanation for that feeling I get when I hear a favorite song or see a moving performance, and I get tingles, or goose bumps, on the back of my neck and arms?

A. Strong responses to music such as chills, shivers, or piloerection aka goose bumps seem to be accompanied by increased cerebral blood flow in brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal, including regions such as the ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala and prefrontal cortex.

These structures are the same as those activated by eating chocolate, having sex or taking the most commonly abused drugs.

It's thought that getting goose bumps while listening to music is a type of fight or flight response – in a sense, the music is hijacking body systems that usually reward you when you are doing something to promote survival.

Evolutionarily, goose bumps are a common fear-response in the animal world - they are a means to make the animal look larger by fluffing out the fur or quills, like in the case of porcupines.

Goose bumps in humans, given our obvious lack of thick body-hair, is a kind of evolutionary leftover. When it occurs in humans who are highly attentive to and engrossed in a performance or art object, the "rush" or "shiver" is highly pleasurable, rather than indicating that there's something threatening going on. Because this seems to be a sort of mixed nervous system response, somewhere between fear and pleasure, some scientists suggest that what we feel in these instances may be an emergent property of a brain that, through evolution, now reassigns and categorizes abstract stimuli like music or painting into a subtler experience, beyond the black and white, pleasure-danger evolutionary dichotomy.

Gabe Turow is the musician-in-residence in Child Life Services at UC San Francisco Children's Hospital and helped found the annual International Symposium on Music and the Brain at Stanford University.

Sheri Zidenberg-Cherr

Q. Is it true that coffee when prepared in the espresso or cappuccino form has been found to be a cause of higher cholesterol? I’m very proud of cutting out fast foods, high fat and my addiction to chocolate - but giving up my cappuccino will be hard.

 A. Coffee contains several substances that may have either beneficial or harmful effects on the cardiovascular system. Whether coffee consumption affects blood cholesterol levels has been a matter of debate and controversy for several years. There are conflicting reports in the literature, most likely due to differences in coffee preparations used in the studies and specific study designs.

An important consideration is whether the drink is prepared from filtered or unfiltered coffee. Unfiltered coffee or coffee prepared using metal filters contain substances called diterpenes including cafestol and kahweol. High concentrations of these substances are present in boiled, Turkish and French press coffees. A recent study reported increases in blood cholesterol levels in individuals consuming five cups of French press coffee per day for four weeks. Thus media headlines citing that “coffee drinking increases cholesterol” were based on a study where people consumed very high amounts of non-filtered coffee. In espresso coffee, the small serving size makes it an intermediate source of cafestol and kahweol (4 mg/cup). Moderate (one to two cups per day) coffee consumption has not been associated with negative cardiovascular effects. Just like with other dietary recommendations for health, moderation is the key. Having a cappuccino should not pose any health risk, however, the healthiest choice would be non- or low-fat versions of the drink.

Sheri Zidenberg-Cherr is a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Nutrition at UC Davis. Her bi-monthly publication, Nutrition Perspectives, provides research-based information on food and nutrition.

Due to the volume of Ask it! submissions, not all questions can be answered online.

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