eli5: If your hands get cold and you run them under warm water why does it BURN?
In: 20
When you touch something very cold, like ice, and then suddenly put your hands under warm water, your skin feels a big change in temperature. Your skin has tiny sensors that send messages to your brain. The fast temperature change can make those sensors send lots of messages, and your brain might interpret it as a “burning” feeling, even though it’s not actually hot enough to hurt you. It’s like when you touch something really cold and it feels like an intense tickle – your body’s way of letting you know something different is happening!
Your nerves don’t sense how hot or cold something is, they sense the difference in temperature between their temperature and whatever you’re touching.
At first whenever your hands are getting cold you feel the cold. But after a while your hands feel normal to you despite them being freezing. However, your nerves are also colder, so the difference between cold hands and warm water is close to the difference between warm hands and very hot water.
The Cold also has a numbing effect. When they warm back up the blood vessels expand causing them to warm up quickly. You don’t feel temperature, you feel a change in temperature. So you don’t really feel how cold your hands are, they quickly regain feeling, and you have a large difference in temperature. Its not that different from when you first step into a show and the water feels too hot until you get used to it
Feeling Temperature is relative to the temperature of your appendage. We know what 80 degree water feels like when youre 70 degrees, but when youre 50 degrees, 80 feels way Hotter.
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