the star emotion, or when bad stuff feels good

I am going to connect some points.

I’ve got what I jokingly refer to as “syntactician’s disease,” which is to say that I really enjoy the P600 sensation and do silly things to give it to myself (and others) on purpose. I’ve also got an incredibly strong frisson response to specific music, and I think they’re related to a similar Brain Haver’s Experience.

The P600 is — and this is oversimplifying a lot, psycholinguists please be nice to me — the weird “zap” feeling that humans experience when something weird happens

According to a really fun recent paper, people eventually get used to certain very zappy constructions. In this paper, the authors exposed people to one of the really zappy ones (subject island violations, like below) over a period of time. People not only got kind of desensitized, but also started finding the constructions actually kind of normal-sounding.

Who did stories about terrify John?

Anecdotally I’ve been saying this since I was an undergrad — not only did I get used to those kinds of constructions, but I actively say them now, pretty randomly! They still feel a little zappy, but in a good way, and I like it!

When I teach Syntax 1, which is most student’s introduction to syntax (especially at my current digs, where Intro to Linguistics is not a pre-req), on the first day of class I start by calibrating my students to be able to detect the brain-zappy feeling. Instead of describing the feeling first, I attempt to inflict it on them, then ask them to describe the qualitative experience. I like to inflict it on them with a different kind of island violation, because I enjoy making these types of constructions:

Which book don’t you remember who wrote?

I ask them if they know what the sentence means (and they usually do, after thinking about it for a second. But they almost universally report this as causing a weird brain sensation. Lately I’ve been interested in how they describe the sensation — their answers mostly fall into the broad categories of “yucky” (disgusting, gross), “angry” (I hate it, I hate you, infuriating), “ouchie” (That hurts, ow!, stings), or “zingy” (static shock, startled, zapped). I’m in that last group, myself. (I don’t know of any research right now on why different people experience this effect qualitatively differently, and I am apparently “advised against picking up a fifth subdiscipline and research program” if I “want to make it through pre-tenure review” or “whatever,” so I can’t look into this myself. If you know, or want to look into it, please tell me about it!!)

Anyways.

What dots am I connecting? Oh right, music.

I experience a very strong frisson to certain music: specifically celtic fiddle. More specifically scottish fiddle, particularly the cape breton dialect (particularly the subdialect group that goes by way of the central coast of california. sociolinguists PLEASE start documenting this specific phenomenon. Who are the labovians of ethnomusicology? who should I be reading??). The frisson is incredibly consistent, such that particular tracks on particular albums will reliably trigger it every time. I time out my train commute by when the fiddle is going to do The Thing to my body. I don’t think I experience this sensation with most of the other stuff that people report as triggering ASMR, and my qualitative experience is overlapping with other peoples’ descriptions of both ASMR and frisson.

Some theories about the underlying mechanism (possibly) behind both frisson and ASMR are that it’s like… pleasurable suppression of fear. I don’t pretend to be deeply read on this literature at all, but I’m kind of obsessed with this 2018 paper by Kovacevich and Huron, who say:

The most developed theory is that proposed by Huron (2006), [who] proposed that affective contrast can lead to marked pleasurable experiences. That is, a negatively valenced response (such as fear) can be suppressed resulting in an overall positively valenced effect. A classic example is provided by the surprise party in which an unexpected surprise produces momentary startle or even panic, which is then suppressed due to cognitive appraisal of the innocuousness of the situation. […]

Huron (2006) argued that the suppression of fear underlies all three responses: frisson, awe, as well as laughter. Following Burke, Huron proposed a “suppressed fear” theory, whose basic claim is that pleasure is evoked when a stimulus activates subcortical structures associated with fear (notably the amygdalae) which are then inhibited or suppressed due to cognitive (cortical) appraisal that the stimulus is innocuous.

I find this totally fascinating in relation to my experiences with frisson as well as my experiences with the P600, the “asterisk” emotion as I sometimes call it (because we denote ungrammatical stimuli with a *). I don’t think it’s exactly… fear, so much as surprise. Surprise and fear are very linked for me, though — I have an incredibly strong startle response, and experience being startled (like by a dog barking or a door slamming) as a ripple of pain all over my body. Not dissimilar to frisson, honestly, just the evil version.

Ungrammaticality is a hard thing to talk about with non-syntacticians. Some linguists don’t really think that a mental grammar is a real thing that exists, so talking about something being counter to that mental grammar gets us into some hot water there. But the experiential phenomenon, the qualia, is real and easily observable (if, again, complicated). And psycholinguists definitely talk about surprisal as a thing that’s maybe slightly distinct from grammatical issues. Brains go “aah!” when they get surprised, and language is one of the many stimuli that can surprise us. It makes sense!

In fact, one of my favorite times a non-linguist has noticed ungrammaticality was in a Dungeons and Dragons podcast, The Adventure Zone. In the podcast, the dungeon master (Griffin) is role-playing as a magical shark (Blink Shark 1) who can temporarily communicate with one of the characters (Zoox). Another player (Travis) loves the way the sharks communicate, and describes the brain sensation he experiences as ASMR:

Griffin: The one that blinked you looks back to the other two and they
kinda shake their head, and they say…
Blink Shark 1: That was nonsense garbage words. We understand not
them. We are very dangerous animals, but not now to you, yes?
Zoox: Um, you are not dangerous to me because you could’ve like — you
could have bitten me in half.
Blink Shark 1: There —
Zoox: Or even some other fraction.
Blink Shark 1: There is an understanding.
Zoox: Um… Why did you bring me here?
Griffin: The blink shark that bit you looks back at the other two, who nod
again, and it turns back and says…
Blink Shark 1: We have a favor job that you will be doing to escape
eating from us. Acknowledgement?
Zoox: Ab — Yes. Yes —
Travis: Why is this making me so happy? Just hearing Griffin say that in
such confidence is like triggering my ASMR, I think?
Griffin: [chuckles] Okay.

In the context of the game, Travis is definitely commenting on the Blink Shark’s grammar, not anything about Griffin’s voice-acting. The ASMR he’s experiencing is almost certainly a P600, the ungrammaticality sensation, because Blink Shark grammar is successfully different enough from human english to be really like… like yeah, that’s a different grammar. Something’s going on there.

What’s so fascinating to me is not just that these sensations might all be connected — ASMR, frisson, and ungrammaticality — but also that the way different people experience the sensations are so different. What is the mechanism? What is going on in that thing????

I don’t really have a conclusion to this blog post, other than to just try and describe the phenomena and how I see them as connected. I would be MUCH obliged if one of you does approximately ten to twenty years of research on this and gets a big grant and writes a book to tell me what it’s all about. Have the neurolinguists doing EEG and MRI stuff talked to the ASMRologists? I don’t know, please get on that! I did find a few papers about EEG studies of ASMR, and a couple about musical chills, but I don’t know enough about types of waves to be able to interpret them. Let me know! For real! My email address is very easy to find!!

No list of links on this one because this post is just such a turbo-ADHD ramble. In the old days this would have been a twitter thread. Nowadays you can find me on bluesky, where I don’t do long rambling threads THAT often.