I just learned that humans don’t have receptors to sense wetness. What is it that we feel when water touches our skin then?

Question

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?

In: 1135

Answer 1

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.