Why do we feel an ice cold sensation for a brief moment before the pain of a thousand suns when we touch boiling hot water/a super hot surface?
In: Biology
There’s clusters of nerves around some of your joints that trigger you muscles to yank back when they get a pain response before your brain even knows what’s happening.
The way that your hand senses temperatures is surprising. There are sensors for “warm” or “cool”, and a different sensor for “**VERY**”!
I saw a really fun exhibit at the [Exploratorium](https://www.exploratorium.edu/) museum in San Francisco. It had a bar you could touch that *felt* like it was super, burning hot, but really it wasn’t. It had alternating coils of luke warm and super cold. When you touched it, your brain interpreted “warm” plus “VERY” as “very hot,” even though that’s not actually what it was. Here’s an [article](http://annex.exploratorium.edu/xref/exhibits/hot-cold.html) about that.
ELI5 answer: The nerves that carry heat/cold sensation to your brain are faster than the nerves that carry pain.
ELI15 answer: It’s because the termpature-sensing nerves are covered in myelin. Myelin makes the electrical signal travel a lot faster.
ELI30 answer:
https://images.app.goo.gl/fZMuuwz9n9vGQFDS6
https://images.app.goo.gl/RyFtjS7T68MLd2Je7
It is called paradoxial heat response: basically if your skin gets too hot very fast your receptors for feeling cold get activated faster than the receptors for feeling hot. Thats why you feel cold for a short period of time.
Your brain is programmed to scream “BAD GET BACK” first, and then figure out what kind of bad later on.
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