From my understanding, we’re able to feel the temperature, texture and pressure of water. And if we’re able to feel all that, what more else is there? What defines wetness and what should it feel like?
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This is how neural networks learn, which are modeled on the brain.
Whether you sense wetness or not, you correlate other feelings that are associated with wetness.
Something decreasing in temperature might be wet. Something decreasing the friction on your fingers running together? Might be wet. Something that then drips down my hand? Might be wet.
Too much friction reduction? Might be slippery more than wet, like an oil or lubricant.
So we associate these senses to create a probability matrix of something being “wet” or not.
Pretty much everything our brain does follows this, matching correlation sense data.
We’re just a big cluster of statistical probabilities thinking we’re smart.
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>From my understanding, we’re able to feel the temperature, texture and pressure of water. And if we’re able to feel all that, what more else is there?
That’s it. You’ve got it. But those aren’t “wetness” — it’s temperature, texture, and pressure. We don’t have nerves that directly respond to moisture; we infer wetness from the others.
The key paragraph from [a 2014 study](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141001133416.htm) appears to be the following:
>”Based on a concept of perceptual learning and Bayesian perceptual inference, we developed the first neurophysiological model of **cutaneous wetness sensitivity centered on the multisensory integration of cold-sensitive and mechanosensitive skin afferents**,” the research team wrote. “Our results provide evidence for the existence of a specific information processing model that underpins the neural representation of a typical wet stimulus.” [Emphasis mine.]
What the emphasized section says is precisely what you said: we arrive at an understanding that something is “wet” based on temperature, texture, and pressure.
People are acknowledging he’s right but the question remains. What is “wetness” if not the sensation described?
They’re wrong, you detect the change of dryness/wetness in your mucus membranes when you breathe. These scientists need
To get out of the lab and experience outdoors and life. Jesus Christ
Humans can’t sense temperature. That is false.
You can prove this at home. Take your socks off in the winter and walk between two different floorings in the same room. For example if you have a carpeted floor next to a tile floor in the same area of a house. The tile floor will feel colder than the carpet even though they are both at the same room temperature.
What you actually sense is the movement of heat energy. And this is how you can sense wetness. Water has a high thermal mass. Energy/heat will always move from high to low. Because water has more thermal mass than in body heat will move towards it when the air is cooler than your body. Making the water feel cold. Or, the heat will move into your body when the air temp is above your body temp.
This is also why humidity has such a huge effect on people.
Is moisture the essence of wetness?
The way we understand “wetness” is a combination of texture, temperature, and the like
You feel something is wet because it’s cold, and when you remove your hand, your hand is slippery, and you can feel it cool down as the water evaporates.
We can also tell that water is thicker than air when we go swimming
Obviously you can feel the pressure from when water hits your skin. But as far as just having wet skin, the majority of the sensation comes from temperature difference. Water is really good at absorbing heat from your body, but then it evaporates and takes the heat with it, leaving you cold. It’s why you sweat, and it’s called “evaporative cooling”.
It’s just detecting temperature and texture. One night years ago I was at one of my friends’ bonfires and started feeling a bunch of tiny pinprick sensations on my shoulder, like little cold spots. At first, I thought my arm had fallen asleep or I had inadvertently triggered a nerve, but slowly realized, nope, it had started raining, and those little pinprickles were light raindrops. Without any other sensory information, and while thoroughly distracted, the brain can’t tell the difference.
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