Why do all cultures, despite no direct contact, converge on remarkably similar aesthetic practices that consume substantial resources without overt adaptive value? Singh’s “subjective functionalism” offers a compelling answer: cultural forms persist and converge because they feel good to individuals across our shared humanity, with positive epistemic emotions serving as a universal compass to navigate and shape the cultural manifold. Here, we review a decade of empirical research across affective neuroscience, psychology, and neurotechnology, providing direct evidence for this subjective functionalism: aesthetic pleasure acts as a reinforcement signal for culturally learned meaning.

Aesthetic chills (hereafter, chills) – the involuntary shivers or goosebumps that accompany moments of awe or transcendence in response to cultural devices such as art, science, and religious rituals – offer a precise model of how feeling encodes meaning with clear neurobiological correlates. Chills are discrete, measurable bodily events that occur when perception and cognition resonate along the cortical hierarchy (Schoeller & Perlovsky, Reference Schoeller and Perlovsky2016). Oftentimes, the experiences resulting in chills satisfy an inherent “knowledge instinct” (Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Eskinazi and Garreau2018) that drives humans to seek meaning through non-propositional pathways when conventional epistemic channels exhaust themselves, triggering somatic validation that confirms deep structural resonance between cultural artifact and cognitive architecture. Neuroimaging links chills to dopaminergic circuits of the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and orbitofrontal cortex (Blood & Zatorre, Reference Blood and Zatorre2001; Salimpoor et al., Reference Salimpoor, Benovoy, Larcher, Dagher and Zatorre2011) as well as synchronized theta and beta oscillations across prefrontal and limbic networks (Chabin et al., Reference Chabin, Gabriel, Chansophonkul, Michelant, Joucla, Haffen, Moulin, Comte and Pazart2020). Dopamine release during chills signals not mere hedonic pleasure but the validation of high-level layers in a hierarchical world model (Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Jain, Adrien, Maes and Reggente2024a). The dopaminergic system whispers: “This fragment of the cultural manifold illuminates your position within it; integrate accordingly.”

In machine learning, grokking occurs when an overfitted model suddenly achieves generalization after extended training with no visible progress, mirroring the cognitive leap from rote memorization to comprehension. Physiologically, chills correspond to such a “grok” event, the moment when prediction error collapses, and learning saturates (Schoeller, Eskinazi, & Garreau, Reference Schoeller, Eskinazi and Garreau2018). Subjectively, chills co-occur with insight, unity, meaning, and self-transcendence (Christov-Moore et al., Reference Christov-Moore, Schoeller, Lynch, Sacchet and Reggente2024; Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Jain, Adrien, Maes and Reggente2024a). Interoceptive awareness mediates this relationship: individuals more attuned to bodily signals report stronger insight and positive affect (Christov-Moore et al., Reference Christov-Moore, Schoeller, Vaccaro, Pluimer, Iacoboni, Kaplan and Reggente2025). Together, these data demonstrate that aesthetic pleasure is a precision signal guiding model calibration – the mechanism by which Singh’s “felt usefulness” shapes cultural transmission.

The same principles that explain how art transmits knowledge also enable its deliberate modulation. Once societies learn to evoke chills reliably, they gain leverage over the mechanisms of epistemic validation. Modern media already exploit this through music, film scores, and viral videos; we have compiled a validated database of such chill-eliciting stimuli: ChillsDB (Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Christov-Moore, Lynch and Reggente2023). Importantly, no stimulus universally evokes chills, with susceptibility systematically varying as a function of demographic, personality, and state factors (Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Christov-Moore, Lynch, Diot and Reggente2024b). Such resonance profiles define micro-cultures of aesthetic preference that may serve as the empirical substrate of Singh’s cultural attractors.

In therapeutic settings, we have begun to recognize the potential for these aesthetic super-attractors to serve as precision technologies for recalibrating maladaptive beliefs. In a trial of patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder, conceptualized as disorientation within the cultural manifold, exposure to ChillsDB stimuli decreased shame and increased self-acceptance, mimicking key phenomenological aspects of psychedelic therapy (Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Jain, Pizzagalli and Reggente2024c). Similar work showed improved reward learning in anhedonic depression (Jain et al., Reference Jain, Schoeller, Esfand, Duda, Null, Reggente and Maes2025). These findings suggest that chills re-engage mesolimbic reward circuits, offering a non-pharmacological path to belief revision and motivational restoration. Building on this, we developed “schema surgery,” a generative-AI framework that produces personalized variants of ChillsDB stimuli to deactivate specific maladaptive schemas in depression (Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Jain, Dumitrescu, Johnson, Maes and Reggente2024). This system effectively engineers micro-cultural experiences that restore coherence and meaning – an applied realization of Singh’s cultural functionalism within precision psychiatry.

If chills index the interoceptive signature of epistemic alignment, their mechanism can be targeted directly through neurotechnology. Indeed, it has been shown that a device that generates cold and vibrotactile sensations along the spine of participants at specific chill-inducing moments from ChillsDB stimuli, the occurrence rate and intensity of chills significantly increase (Haar et al., Reference Haar, Jain, Schoeller and Maes2020). With such success, it becomes sensible to consider augmenting chills using neurmodulattion (e.g., transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS; Dell’Italia et al., Reference Dell’Italia, Sanguinetti, Monti, Bystritsky and Reggente2022)) to modulate mesolimbic and insular networks, amplifying the bodily shiver and corresponding dopaminergic activation (Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Jain, Pizzagalli and Reggente2024c). Alternatively, neurofeedback offers an interesting avenue to permit a shift from chills as a surprising event to a volitionally induced state; by displaying real-time indices of the neural signatures and the distance between current and expected (chills) neural states, individuals could learn to voluntarily control the onset of chills.

The ability to engineer chills carries profound ethical implications. Cultural technologies that harness chills can align or distort belief systems with equal power – a neurophysiological substrate for what Singh warns could become directed cultural evolution. Indeed, terrorist recruitment videos that emphasize shared humanity through martyrdom demonstrate how chills can be co-opted for ideological control. Yet, when used transparently and therapeutically, precision aesthetics can restore alignment in individuals “lost” in the manifold – those suffering from depression, anhedonia, or meaning crises (Jain et al., Reference Jain, Schoeller, Esfand, Duda, Null, Reggente and Maes2025; Schoeller et al., Reference Schoeller, Jain, Adrien, Maes and Reggente2024a). In this sense, chills are both probes and promoters of meaning (as workouts are for fitness): they reveal and repair the coupling between world and self.

In line with a long tradition in aesthetics dating back to its foundation, aesthetics, as Singh proposes, is the interface where feeling meets cognition. Our findings extend this claim: aesthetic emotions are not decorative by-products but core cognitive calibration mechanisms that can now be measured, modeled, and modulated. The chills response bridges subjective conviction and objective neurobiology, transforming art from ornament into instrument. With neurotechnologies that allow humans to self-induce the very feelings art once evoked, culture may outgrow its artifacts. In the words of Konrad Lorenz (Reference Konrad1974), humanity may “direct its own evolution” – not biologically but cognitively – by mastering the aesthetic mechanisms that once guided it “blindly.”