The Neurobiology of Aesthetic Chills: How Bodily Sensations Shape Emotional Experience

Name: The Neurobiology of Aesthetic Chills: How Bodily Sensations Shape Emotional Experience
Author: Felix Schoeller

The Neurobiology of Aesthetic Chills: How Bodily Sensations Shape Emotional Experience is a work by Felix Schoeller (2024).

Core claims

Schoeller synthesizes neuroimaging, psychophysiological, and phenomenological evidence to propose that aesthetic chills are generated by a specific neural circuit involving the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and periaqueductal gray — a circuit that integrates interoceptive signals with reward processing and homeostatic regulation.
The paper argues that aesthetic chills are not merely emotional responses to beauty but interoceptive prediction errors — moments when the body’s actual physiological state diverges from its predicted state in a manner the brain codes as rewarding, linking aesthetic experience directly to the body’s self-regulatory intelligence.
By grounding aesthetic experience in interoceptive processing, Schoeller provides the neural architecture for the depth psychological claim that the body is the unconscious in its most immediate form — that the organism’s aesthetic response is an act of somatic cognition prior to conscious evaluation.

If aesthetic chills are interoceptive prediction errors, does this imply that the numinous encounter is fundamentally a somatic event — the body registering a disruption in its own self-model that the ego subsequently interprets as awe, beauty, or the sacred?
How does Schoeller’s interoceptive model of aesthetic experience connect to van der Kolk’s thesis that trauma disrupts interoception — could the traumatized individual’s aesthetic impoverishment be understood as a failure of the body’s predictive processing to generate rewarding prediction errors?