There once was a jaded old man who couldn't remember the last time he'd experienced goosebumps.

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The hairs on his arms had stopped standing to attention. That delicious shiver down his spine was almost forgotten. The warm, almost sensual, fluttering of his heart had become a distant memory.

The old man wasn't unhappy. Just increasingly difficult to impress.

It wasn't that he had stopped appreciating beauty. He could still lose himself in an uplifting piece of music or be astonished by a brilliant sunset. But somewhere along the way, in an age when technology delivers so many miracles every morning they are forgotten by lunchtime, the magic of everyday life had faded.

Then last weekend someone strapped a helmet to his head and showed him the universe.

For the next 50 minutes he felt six decades of accumulated cynicism peel away. He stared into the cold, dark heart of a black hole and was mesmerised. He watched new stars being born in a violent galactic nursery and his heart began racing. He walked gingerly on the surface of a hot alien world, dodging flames and flowing lava, and shivered.

The old man knew it was all an illusion. His virtual reality helmet at the Smithsonian's Starstruck Immersive experience in Melbourne was playing elaborate tricks with his brain. But his brain didn't care. Somehow the technology had ignited a sensation that had lain dormant for too long.

He was awestruck. The goosebumps proved it.

Scientists call it frisson, the French word for "shiver", when explaining how certain experiences can spark an involuntary physical reaction. Songs that make your eyes well with tears and paintings that take your breath away - those unexpected moments that send a tingle through your skin and a tickle down your spine.

Frisson seems to be a peculiarly human experience and scientists are beginning to identify its biological origins; the release of dopamine in the brain's circuitry, the cascade of electrical and chemical signals, the contractions of tiny muscles attached to hair follicles creating goosebumps.

A recent study also suggests our ability to be physically moved by beauty may be partly inherited,........

© The Examiner