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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“Wetness” isn’t really a fundamental quality of something. There are physical qualities that apply to lots of different things, and we use those qualities in combination with other qualities to create our own definitions for things like “wetness”.
Temperature, ironically enough, isn’t even something you can feel directly. What you actually feel is heat transfer, which is dependent on a difference in temperature between you and the thing, but also on how well you and the thing conduct heat. This is why leaving something metal and something wood out in the sun gives predictable results when you pick them up. The metal is going to feel much hotter, but the actual temperature of the two objects are going to be close to the same.
Wetness then, can be described as a combination of pressure and temperature. Water touching you versus air touching you is going to feel different even if they are the same temperature because of heat transfer. And water will both be a weight on you, and also it will reduce friction, and therefore reduce the amount of force needed to say, slide your thumb across your fingers, which would be felt by pressure sensors.
Lastly, our brains do not really rely on any one sense at a time. We know what water looks like, so if we dip our hands in water and look at them, we know (or at least have a pretty good starting point) that it is water without even involving our other senses. But imagine for a minute that the bowl of water was actually rubbing alcohol. Everything would look and feel pretty much the same, except your hand would feel much colder because the alcohol would evaporate which drastically improved the heat transfer. And together our brains piece these bits of info together and we think “that must be alcohol”. Both feel wet, it’s just one of the pieces we use to determine that was slightly different.
So, all that together means we really determine wetness by a combination of senses, but considering tactile sense it is a combination of temperature and pressure primarily.
How is it that our fingertips wrinkle and become pruney underwater then? The act of wrinkling seems to be a reflexive act – fingertips don’t wrinkle underwater if the nerve has been cut.
Air blowing on the wet spot (coolness), especially on bare skin. Clothing clinging to skin and impeding our movement.
So interesting. Reminds me when I wear those long gloves when washing dishes. Sometimes I can’t tell if water got into the gloves or if my hands got sweaty or if it’s just the feeling of the water on the outside of the gloves.
Wait we can’t sense wetness then how can every Southern person I know tell me it’s gonna rain ?
I believe we do have a bunch of specialised receptors above our lips and brows that are solely responsible for telling our brain whether we are submerged or in the atmosphere. These receptors are responsible for kicking in the mammalian dive reflex which changes a bunch of things in our body to adapt to diving. In a way we might call it a wetness sense.
That’s why if you put hand in rubber glove into a bucket of water you’d feel like it’s wet.
Makes sense, like when you don’t realise you haven’t towelled a part of your body after getting out of shower/bath until you feel a breeze on it
Try putting on some latex gloves and then running your hands under water. It really messes with your head!
Things feel wet through latex gloves, like they’re leaking, but when removed, your hands are dry.
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