Music can do much more than just give you chills.

In their paper Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music, psychologist-musician Psyche Loui and Wesleyan student Luke Harrison explored a phenomenon wherein music causes powerful sensations that mirror sexual orgasm.

The BBC’s David Robson has explored their work, which has tried to connect the musical features — like sudden changes in harmony, dynamic leaps and melodic appoggiaturas — that cause these sensations, with the regions of the brain and mechanisms that correspond with them.

“Musical frisson elicit a physiological change that’s locked to a particular point in the music,” says Loui, and the below playlist contains some of the songs that caused the most “skin orgasms” in test subjects. See for yourself and read the full piece via the BBC.

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