eli5: If your hands get cold and you run them under warm water why does it BURN?

Question

eli5: If your hands get cold and you run them under warm water why does it BURN?

In: 20

Answer 1

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.