An aesthetic chill is the shiver you get from a piece of music, a scene in a film, or a moment of unexpected beauty.
It lasts a few seconds. During those seconds, dopamine surges through the brain's core reward network — the same circuitry that research has linked to motivational deficits in depression. These moments can temporarily restore reward sensitivity, creating a brief but real window for motivation and action.
Reward learning restored
Participants with anhedonic depression who experienced chills showed significant improvement in reward learning — the brain's ability to seek and respond to positive outcomes.
Emotional breakthrough
In 96 participants with MDD, chills correlated with emotional breakthrough scores — the same measure used in psychedelic-assisted therapy research.
73.5% prediction accuracy
The personalization engine predicts individual chill responses with 73.5% accuracy, validated across 2,900+ participants.
ReWire doesn't leave this to chance. A personalization engine trained on thousands of responses finds the content most likely to give you chills. After each session, it captures your insights and turns them into something real. A place to visit, an event to attend, a person to call. All within five minutes of where you are right now so you can do it today.
We're recruiting our first cohort of therapists.
We're looking for clinicians who specialize in behavioral activation and somatic therapies to try ReWire with their clients for research purposes. Patients use the app between sessions to re-engage reward circuitry on their own — creating a short window where activation tasks feel possible.
Participation is free. No contract, no EHR integration. You share a link, your client is in. The therapist dashboard gives you visibility into session frequency, response patterns, and engagement so you can adjust treatment accordingly.
Zero setup
No technical integration. No onboarding. Share a link, your client is in.
Session monitoring
See when clients use ReWire, how they respond, and whether engagement is holding.
Structured feedback
Clients log post-session actions and mood. You see the data in your dashboard.
A decade of peer-reviewed research.
The science behind ReWire is published in peer-reviewed journals. ChillsDB, the underlying stimulus database, is one of the largest curated collections of chill-inducing audiovisual content in existence.
Dose-dependent antidepressant and anti-anhedonic effects of aesthetic chills: a randomized controlled trial
A 5-day digital intervention using chills-inducing audiovisual stimuli in 62 adults with moderate depression. Participants reporting 3+ chills showed large effect sizes on PHQ-9 (d = 1.25), with 75% resolving clinical anhedonia at 2-month follow-up versus 20% of controls.