How To Give Your Reader a Skin Orgasm
Invoking responses with sensory imaging
by J.L.Canfield
All of us have experienced chills or as they are called in scientific research, frissons. The tingling, electrifying, goosebump producing moments that make our heart race, our breathe quicken with fear or excitement; those instances when your brain goes on an emotional roller coaster ride.
The memory-making thrills may have been invoked by your first airplane liftoff, first date, first kiss, meeting the love of your life, a car totaling wreck, a roller coaster ride, even an unexpected bump against a person in a crowded area. Whatever it was caused you to have a skin orgasm imprinted deeply enough that when you search your memory, everything about that moment comes back to you, including the feeling which is called a mind chill. Any kind of chill is the reaction writers should try to create for their readers.
Frissons are sensory reactions to an exciting event created by sounds, smells, tastes, and even visuals. If senses work together to give the receiver a full sensory experience, then why don’t story writers combine them to provide the readers with moments that stick with them? Is it essential for a writer to try to elicit an intense emotional response from a reader? The answer is yes, it is. When you give your reader a skin orgasm, you make a connection with them they won’t forget. That’s why you, as a writer, should make an effort to describe what’s happening to your character using all five senses.
Composers have understood this since the beginnings of time. Some do it better than others, but all of them, Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Berlioz, Mozart, for example, knew how to keep their listeners involved by cleverly playing with their listener’s brains. When we are intrigued, our mind goes into an active mode. It expects to be stimulated. It’s got the body’s neurotransmitters fired up and ready to send waves of emotional producing serotonin and dopamine coursing down the nervous system’s pathways to the places where they cause the body to respond with pleasure, pain, anxiety, fear, euphoria.
Short of creating an audiobook with background music, or one that reaches out and does to you the physical action being described, how can a writer achieve this goal of emotional reader response? Perhaps the conclusions of this study conducted by researchers and professors at an arts college will help you to understand the whys and hows of eliciting euphoric piloerection sensory imaging.
Oliver Grewe from Hannover University of Music and Drama along with several colleagues, designed an experiment to see if it was possible to give frissons by means other than music or sexual interactions. The results surprised them.
During the experiment, the participants were exposed to various stimulations. These included songs, but also non-musical sounds such as laughter, babies laughing, waves, leaves rustling, pictures of people displaying emotions, different flavors, and they even got a head massage. While they worked through this litany of tests, the participants were connected to equipment which monitored their heart rates, breathing, and skin conductance. Machines were recording their bodies reactions while researchers asked questions about their internal feelings. This two-prong method was designed to give researchers a thorough understanding of how, when, and what gives the best frisson, chill, skin orgasm to a person.
These results were compared to results from one they did using the same equipment, the same questions, but with music as the only stimulus. The purpose was to see how closely the reactions would align.
What the researchers found out was each sensory stimulation could bring about frisson but in differing amounts. An example of this: 16 participants reacted to the taste of sour lemons with the same goosebumps as they felt at the height of musical enthrallment. Why would a tart lemon give the same chills as Beethoven’s fifth? The assumption is these feelings were produced by the sympathetic nervous system being stimulated. This is the one that deals typically with perceived threats. Writers with this information can make a reader feel a chill with vivid descriptions of intense flavors and smells. The same feelings can get induced by pulling from their readers memories a rift of a well-known piece of music. A gentle ramp-up of the automatic threat response which resides in us all can elicit a response that stays imprinted on readers minds for a long time. Keeping your work in their memory is one very valuable way to gain a follower for life.
The stimulus that gave the least amount of skin orgasms was pictures chosen by the researchers. No explanation has been given as to the why for this. They have suggested that photos require some back story or comment to gain responses. Now that’s interesting because writers are told how important book covers are to get a reader’s attention. The lack of response from a participant to a photo used in the study may be connected to the lack of text on the picture.
When the researchers later allowed the participants to pick pictures, songs, or film clips, they wished to view; their frisson measurements went up along with their heart activity. Was this due to an imprinted memory, music combined with sound on the film, a combination of both? Maybe.
The critical takeaway point of this study for a writer is science has proven that to give their reader a skin orgasm, something which everyone wants to secretly enjoy, they must use all the senses in creating their work. Whether its a love scene, tension buildup, emotional release, when you get the reader so engulfed they keep turning the pages until the story ends, you make a fan who eagerly awaits your next book.
The paper which detailed this study by Oliver Grewe was released and published in 2010.
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