The People Who Can Control Their Goose Bumps
How is this even possible?
“It starts in the back of my neck,” Javier Palejko told me over Skype. “It’s like I have a muscle there and I just make it work.”
The “it” in this case was goose bumps, which Palejko, a 34-year-old tech worker in Argentina, says he can control at will. Like most unexceptional people—by which I mean, people whose goose bumps only appear when we’re cold or feeling intense emotions—I could not even begin to imagine how to control goose bumps. I inquired, could he do it, like, right now?
“Let’s try,” he said, angling the webcam toward his forearm. “Do you see it?” And sure enough, within two seconds, the hair follicles on his arm had become bumps,
