(didnt know the right flair)
I am european so i write in celcius!
I am curious how we perceive temperatures (if thats the correct way of putting this).
We have given temperature a standard number for us to make is easy to name it. So 37 degrees (bodytemperature) is for everyone the same.
But how does it work when we give it the names “hot” and “cold”? for example: When you want to take a bath 37 degrees is the minimun temperature for it to be nice, maybe a little higher for your liking, but whenever the news will announce that the temparature outside wil be 37 degrees the next week, we will call it hot. 24 degrees wether is nice wether, but 24 degrees water for a bath is cold.
But its the percieving side of it that i dont get. How is that so different for different surroundings?
In: Other
As part of living the body produces heat. This heat needs to be shed into the surrounding environment. The rate heat transfers varies based on the difference between the temperatures. But not all environments convey heat at the same speed.
Water is about 23.5 times better at transferring heat from the body than air. This means that if your body needs to dump a certain quantity of heat it will be able to do so when water is closer to the temperature of your body, than it would if air was that close to body temperature. Air would need a greater temperature differential to boost the speed heat transfers in order to match that of water.
That explains why water and air are different at similar temperatures, but how temperature *feels* is another huge topic. Something to understand is that the nerves that sense temperature are within the flesh of our bodies so they don’t directly sense the temperature of the things we touch. Instead they allow our brain to deduce the temperatures of things we touch based on the rate of temperature change within our flesh. Remember that the rate of temperature conduction increases as the difference in temperature increases, so when the nerves detect a higher rate of change in temperature within our flesh our brain tends to assume this is because of a greater temperature differential.
However there are other reasons that can happen. Metals for example can conduct heat more readily than other common materials, so when we touch a metal surface at room temperature it can convey heat away from our body faster than for example wood. Our brain though will tend to interpret this increased speed of temperature loss to the material actually being colder, which is why metals tend to “feel cold” even though they are actually the same temperature as everything else nearby.
Beyond that our bodies tend to adapt to ambient conditions such that if you become used to being outside during a cold day, coming inside the air will feel very warm even though later once you become acclimated it feels normal. Add all those factors together and how temperature subjectively feels is very complex and unlikely to be objectively accurate to the real temperature.
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