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The Holy Shiver

July 10, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Holy Shiver

Carmen Maria Machado, the prize-winning writer known for her spooky, charged stories, wrote into Radiolab with a mystery that had been prickling at her for years. When she first hooked up with her partner Lauren Brown, she noticed something strange: Lauren's goosebumps didn't appear in the usual uniform pattern. Instead, they came in leopard spots, or sometimes only where Carmen had touched her arm, "like you leave a trace." Lauren gets goosebumps constantly—from music, from sad moments, from excitement—and Carmen became obsessed with understanding what was happening. She started researching, and discovered an old term for the phenomenon: "the holy shiver." It's a phrase scientists have used to describe the goosebumps a prey animal gets when it realizes it's being watched by a predator, but also the goosebumps the predator gets just before it goes in for the kill. "It's arousal that connects things like sex and fear and pleasure and excitement," Carmen said. She wanted to know what was actually happening in the brain, and why.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:49) **The Mystery of the Leopard-Spot Goosebumps** - Writer Carmen Maria Machado brings Radiolab a personal puzzle: her partner Lauren gets unusual, patterned goosebumps in response to music, sadness, and touch, not just cold or fear.
  • 2 (03:58) **The Holy Shiver** - Carmen discovers an old scientific term for goosebumps that links sex, fear, and pleasure, and realizes Radiolab has never done an episode on the phenomenon.
  • 3 (05:57) **The Tiny Muscle Behind the Bumps** - Science writer Bonnie Tsui explains the erector pili muscle, the evolutionary remnant that gives us goosebumps.
  • 4 (09:42) **From Survival Reflex to Emotional Signal** - Humans began triggering the same goosebump reflex with music, awe, and emotional experiences, not just cold or fear.
  • 5 (12:07) **Aesthetic Chills: The Science of God Bumps** - Neuroscientists Nico Rensis and Felix Scholler study “aesthetic chills”—goosebumps triggered by psychological, not physical, stimuli.
  • 6 (15:53) **Building a Chill Machine** - The researchers create an algorithm to find viral chill-inducing videos and bring people into the lab to study the phenomenon under controlled conditions.
  • 7 (20:23) **The Brain on Chills Looks Like a Psychedelic Trip** - EEG data shows that during aesthetic chills, brain signals become highly complex and disordered, resembling a psychedelic state.

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Show Notes

Lauren Brown gets goosebumps. A lot. Sometimes several times a day. When her partner, writer Carmen Maria Machado, noticed it...she couldn't stop thinking about it. Why does she get them in so many different situations? What’s happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it. We face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.  

Special thanks to Rachel Gross, Gregory Rupik

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by Maria Paz Gutierrez
Produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan
Fact-checking by Angely Mercado

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