How come our bodies can take a beating with punches, slaps, etc., but if we touch a hot pan even for half a second, you get burned and your skin starts blistering immediately?

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How come our bodies can take a beating with punches, slaps, etc., but if we touch a hot pan even for half a second, you get burned and your skin starts blistering immediately?

In: Biology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

This can’t be explained because it’s wrong. You get punched and swelling starts immediately. You get slapped and redness begins immediately. Your body reacts to punching and slapping as quickly as it reacts to a burn, but a burn is generally a more severe trauma, matched by a more severe response.

Unless you get punched right on the button ( and by *button* I mean the chin or jaw – or even behind the ear). Then, nine times out of ten, you’ll go down and/or be knocked out cold. That’s arguably as severe as a burn blister.

Anonymous 0 Comments

These are two totally different types of injuries. Bruises pain is due to pressure sensations (as blood leaks in to muscle and skin) which involves a different type of nerve. Burn pain is tiggers superficial sensory nerves. Burn pain is more similar to superficial scrapes or rug burn. The truth is really severe burns hurt less because even the superficial nerve is damaged

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your body is specifically evolved to get in fights. Strong cheek and brow bones protect your eyes, a layer of fat above the gut, kidneys in your lower back, the ability to make pointy stick technology. It isn’t perfect for example the mandible, genitals, and ears are easy to damage but evolution has to work with what it’s got and her muse is a fickle bitch.

Burns are not a physical damage like you may think. Instead of the breaking of blood vessels, tissue, and bones from fighting, burns cause the molecules that make up your body to just fall apart. Cell membranes will melt, proteins will unwind, in extreme cases you will actually start to see the skin begin to burn. There is not any real reason for humans to evolve resistance to this. How many places in the wild would we have been force to be burned? I can think of very few. Not enough to dictate an advantage for resistance to it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I want you to stop and think. When was the last time you saw a fire that wasn’t man made?
When was the last time you saw something that was as hot as stove that was completely natural.
Unless you’re living right next to a volcano, you’re not likely to see such things very often at all.
And not many people live right next to a volcano.
However pretty much everyone gets bruises every now and again, and we aren’t even hunting stuff with our bare hands.
So evolution made it a priority, animals that couldn’t really survive a bruising died out, those that could thrived.
Not much advantage to an animal resisting a fire much, at least not one without significant trade offs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A punch can break macro structures like veins, and making you skin blue. But most of the cells survive it.

A burn will instead kill all the cells that got above 60celsius. So the whole area is dead, 100% dead. There is no survived cell that can help the surroundings. Your dead tissue will simply stay there and rot. There is not even a blood vessel remaining to bring blood with nutrient, antibodies etc to heal the wound.