Eli5: If our body normal temperature was higher, would cold temperatures feel colder, or would we feel warmer instead?
In: 7
If we take just try and answer the meat of your question without trying to warm up a human 🙂
If we increase the difference between our body temperature and the environment would we feel colder? Sound about right?
We do this when we leave a warm environment and enter a cold one. Not by increasing our temperature but lowering the environment.
Imagine a cool Fall day say it is in the upper 60s (16-20 C,) when we exit the warmer environment we feel cold.
I suspect since we can do what you ask but the net change is similar as I described, we would feel colder.
Cold is not really a thing, it is a lack of heat that we feel. The greater the difference between a heat source (us) and a heat sink (something that has capacity to absorb heat,) in this case the environment the more we feel “cold.”
When you pass by a window and it feels cold, you are actually feeling heat being lost by your body and not cold coming in to the house. Even though we think of it as such.
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