: How do humans feel temperature differences and how precisely can we feel it?
In: Biology
On your skin there are tiny cells called receptors. Their mission is to send a message to your brain when they notice a change in temperature.
We notice changes better if our attention is on how cold or hot it is. If we are busy its harder to notice the difference, so we would need a bigger change to sense it.
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Iirc: your skin has some receptors that are like a sponge, so when the wheater is hot, the pores in the sponge get wider so sodium can get through and travel to the brain, and vice versa when the surroundings are cool, the sponge contracts and theres no longer a stimulus so it feels cold
Relatively. Your body does not measure specific temperatures. I am not sure if this is what you are going for or not but here it is. This is why when you walk into an air conditioned building on a very hot day, you feel very cold. Relative to the outside heat, this room is very cold. Your body eventually will acclimate to the temperature and you will no longer think the room is that cold. This is why I have to keep slowly increasing the water temp in my shower as I stand in there longer and longer.
Receptors in your skin feel everything – there’s a little computer program with wires that run back to your brain. There’s afferent and efferent nerves that essentially receive and initiate action – so if you touch something too hot you pull your hand away. I learned in paramedic school that we have receptors for temperature but not for “wet” – if you put your hand in water you’re not ”supposed” to feel it’s water – just the temperature
In short: our nerves feel thermal energy enter or leave our body thus we feel temperature sensation when something nitnskin temperature interacts with us.
From what I understand: we feel the rate of heat transfer into or out of our body.
Objects feel cold or warm to us when they are at a different temperature than your skin. As a result of the ‘0th’ law of thermodynamics (heat transfer goes from high temp to low temp) there is a heat flux (energy transfer per area) that trips your nerves. How hot or cold it feels depends on the magnitude of that heat flux (depends on area of contact, thermal conductivity, temperature difference, and a couple others).
Your skin has stuff called thermal censors which are surprisingly quick to react when touching something cold like ice or something hot like metal on a warm day. Then you remember stuff like this for every day object so you can judge if this is cold/hot to a certain degree.
One thing I haven’t seen posted which should be mentioned is that men and women feel temperature differently.
tl;dr, there are a bunch of reasons men both feel and run hotter, whereas women are typically colder.
>Women are typically smaller and have a higher ratio of surface area to volume, which causes a rapid loss of heat.
>Men tend to have a greater muscle mass than women which helps them to generate heat.
>Even at rest, your muscles produce around 25% of your body’s normal temperature, so more muscle mass means a greater heat production. Because of this, it is believed that women evolved a system to protect their core body temperature against freezing weather – in response to cold surroundings a woman’s body reduces blood flow to the skin and extremities to maintain their core temperature at 37C. This means that women are better than men at conserving core body heat when the weather cools.
>However, as most of our temperature sensors are located in the skin, women can feel cold even when their internal organs are cosy. So it’s not all in your imagination. It seems that women really are genetically programmed to feel drops in temperature before their male counterparts. The ideal temperature appears to be around 2.5C warmer than men – between 24C and 25C.
https://www.simplysupplements.co.uk/healthylife/general-health/body-temperature-how-it-differs-for-men-and-women
You’ll probably see this if you’re ever in an office environment with many people. Women will be wearing sweaters or mention it’s cold whereas men will feel it’s comfortable.
You have special hot and cold receptors all over your body that react to the flow of heat into and out of your body. Unlike a thermometer, your receptors do not detect the actual absolute temperature, which is why metal and water at room temperature feel colder than the room temperature air.
The receptors can detect changes as small as .02 degrees Celsius on some parts of your body. Other parts are 100 times less sensitive.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Thermal_touch
I believe how precisely you can detect temperature differences depends on what you are determining the difference in temperature of. I could probably tell the difference of air temperature of about 5 degrees, but I’ve grown up with a pool and can usually estimate the temperature within 1 degree when I get in and am always within a couple degrees.
I wonder if this has to do with the comfortable range for each. A pool only has about a 10 degree range that I would call comfortable, but I can be comfortable with an air temperature range of about 30 degrees. S
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