Chasing another hare

Or hair.

In the course of checking whether OED contained the word ‘hornswoggle’ yesterday (a word to which I shall return in a post to come), I came across the word ‘horre’, an obsolete word from the Latin verb horrere, to stand on end, applicable to hair. To bristle, to be rough, to shake, tremble, shiver, shudder or quake. In old English a transitive verb meaning to abhor.

Turning to abhor, we find it to be ‘ab’ plus ‘horrere’, roughly something which makes our hair stand on end and from which we turn away. To shrink back in dread. Roughly speaking a word which back in the middle ages and the early modern period had a physical, physiological meaning which has gradually softened, spread out to be used in relation anything to which we have a strong dislike.

Then we have horror and horrid from the same root. But not terror which comes from somewhere else.

Chasing this up this morning, I find that hair standing on end is widespread in the animal kingdom, at least among hairy animals, where it might, inter alia, be a response to fear or a response to cold. In the first case, the idea is to make one look bigger than one really is, which might deter a dim predator. The response of porcupines being particular impressive in this regard. In the second case, the idea is to trap more insulating air around the body, to make one’s hairy blanket more effective.

In humans, hair might stand on end in response to any strong emotion, for example that which might result from listening to music, a response which is associated with shivers, frissons and sudden chills, sudden feelings of being cold.

There is also a link to goose bumps, aka horripilation, caused by the very same mechanism which erects hairs. Other countries talk of chicken bumps or duck bumps, but in any event a bird of dietary importance, which people used to be in the habit of plucking, with the feathers, from the point of view of a anatomist, being fancy hairs. Along with whiskers, quills and such like.

All of which fits with the theory that our feelings and emotions, at least in their beginnings, were derived from bodily feelings, from physiological reactions to our state or our environment.
But then I find out about the small proportion of people who can, by act of will alone, make their hair stand on end, suggesting that feelings are more than a feed-forward derivative of physiology. And odd because the muscles involved in erecting hairs are not the sort of muscles which are controlled by conscious impulses from the nervous system. See reference 1.

Another oddity, is the link through frissons to pleasure in music; the same physiological reaction seeming to be related to fear, arousal and pleasure. With one link here being to reference 2, and another, frustrating, to reference 3, where hair standing on end is linked to either stress or arousal and possibly to golden moments in music. A pity that I did not make a fuller report at the time.

Reference 2 reports on a study involving about 100 undergraduate students of music or psychology, a study looking at the relationship between the experience of frisson and various aspects of personality. The first being measured by both self-report and galvanic skin response and the latter by completion of a popular questionnaire called NEO-PI-R, developed some years ago now by Messrs. Costa & McCrae, as described at reference 4. It seems to be generally agreed that people who score well on something called ‘Openness to experience’ also do well on frisson, with this particular paper emphasising the interaction between emotional and cognitive aspects of that openness. Also that frissons can be reliably generated by unexpected leads or entries in the music - with the fluctuating amount of unexpectedness as one gets to know a piece of music perhaps accounting for the fluctuating impact. At least on me. Is there a link here to all the prediction that a brain goes in for, the sort of prediction talked about by Messrs. Hohwy and Friston?

The trouble one gets into from browsing in the (relatively small) H volume of the OED.

PS: for more on hares, see reference 5, from where the snap above is taken.

References

Reference 1: The voluntary control of piloerection - James Heathers, Kirill Fayn, Paul J Silvia, Niko Tiliopoulos, Matthew S Goodwin – 2018.

Reference 2: Getting aesthetic chills from music: The connection between openness to experience and frisson - Mitchell C. Colver, Amani El-Alayli – 2015.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/06/an-emotional-occasion.html. The violinist, Paul Robertson, died of heart disease less than two months after the event noticed here.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory.

Reference 5: http://acravan.blogspot.com/2013/02/hare-hare-hare.html.