Aesthetic chills — the psychophysiological complex of shivers, goosebumps, and tingling most commonly triggered by music, film, poetry, and ritual — occupy a productive intersection between depth psychology, affective neuroscience, and phenomenology. The corpus surveyed here reveals no settled consensus on definition: whether gooseflesh is constitutive or merely accompanying, whether the somatic locus is spinal, cranial, or peripheral, and whether chills designate a unitary phenomenon or a family of distinct experiential types all remain contested. Schoeller and colleagues approach chills as windows onto the neural architecture of conscious reward, linking them to dopaminergic activity in the VTA, caudate nucleus, and nucleus accumbens, and framing them within predictive-coding accounts of precision signaling. Bannister’s empirical taxonomy — warm, cold, and moving chills — challenges unitary models by demonstrating that valence, bodily activity, and stimulus theme interact to produce phenomenologically distinct varieties. Jain and colleagues document the ‘emotional drift’ chills induce, shifting valence and arousal in measurable directions. Across all positions, chills function as markers of peak experience, crossing cultural, aesthetic, and religious domains. The central tension lies between neurobiological reductionism and phenomenological pluralism: whether chills name a single mechanism of reward satiation or an irreducibly heterogeneous cluster of states linked by somatic surface alone.