Why does cold water sometimes feel hot?

Question

I have just been running a bath and as someone who has mastered the art of being lazy in the bath i proceeded to turn off the cold water with my foot. I as always managed to get the cold water directly onto my skin and it always feels like hot water that always makes me quickly jerk my foot away when it happens to avoid the burning sensation.

i never understood why cold water can feel hot.

thanks for your answers 😀

In: Biology

Answer 1

If a nerve feels two very different temperatures at once, the signals it sends to your brain confuse it and feel like burning (you can try this by touching something cold and hot at the same time, like a piece of metal left outside and a bowl of hot water). Your foot was probably either touching something warm (the bathwater) or was itself warm from the bath, so when you touched the cold water you felt like you were burning.