What’s happening when you think there’s a bug crawling on your leg, but nothing’s there?
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If you have hair on your legs, sometimes they can get caught up on each other and suddenly dislodge, this creates a “bug crawling on your skin” sensation as the hairs move around.
I wanna know why sometimes I legit feel like my leg is getting super hot like it’s about to start burning like a hot phone is resting on leg or something but nothing is there lol?
I don’t know how to say this in five-year-oldish but it’s a bug in another dimension and there’s a glitch in the matrix
Slightly related tangent, it’s possible that we evolved thinner and thinner hair as a way to fight pests:
With much thinner hair, things like ticks, mosquitoes, fleas, lice etc have far less places to hide. Furthermore, our thin, sensitive hair also lets us feel bugs crawling on us way more easily. In fact, many species of lice are so extremely adapted to their particular hosts, that they can’t actually move to other species. So at a certain point, it’s possible that losing our fur allowed us to completely avoid certain species of parasites.
It’s possible that humans evolved to counteract parasites, which might also explain why people instinctively dislike bugs and spiders. At some point in ancient history, the apes that were bothered by every little bug and outlived the ones that ignored them and died of parasite-borne diseases.
This might also be why we like to pet fuzzy animals: apes groom socially to pick out parasites. The apes that liked grooming the most had the fewest bugs, so it eventually got to a point where our brains reward us for touching soft hairy things, with extra sensitive skin on our palms and fingers.
It might even be part of how we became such dexterous tool users: apes need hands that are sturdy enough for climbing, but also delicate enough to pull fleas out of hair. When we adapted to plains living and stopped climbing trees, having super durable hands with vice-like grips and thick skin was no longer as useful, but grooming and parasites never went away.
I find that often times it’s just my luxurious, flowing leg hair that got caught in a breeze.
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