People generally have the same temperature, so the touch should feel neutral, not cooler, not warmer. Why does it feel warmer?
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It depends on where you touch. Hands are usually colder than the core of the body that is protected by clothing or pressed against another part.
Unless it’s cold, humans are constantly trying to shed heat. Even when sitting still or sleeping, your body’s natural processes make a lot of waste heat that you have to get rid of, or you overheat and die. A room full of people can get hot quickly.
Your body has different ways to vary heat loss, like increasing blood flow to the skin, or sweating for evaporative cooling. Your brain also doesn’t care about absolute temperature, it cares about how much heat is flowing, and whether you’re at your goal “set point” temperature. So, metal feels colder than air even when they’re the same temperature, because the metal quickly sucks up heat. A blanket feels warm because it’s insulating you and stopping you from shedding heat.
So, when you touch someone else’s hand, BOTH of your hands are trying to shed heat. Their hand feels hot because it’s preventing you from shedding heat, and your brain calls that “hot.” If their hand feels cold, that usually means their brain has switched to trying to warm up their body, so it’s reduced blood flow to their skin.
The way you feel temperature is not actually the temperature itself, rather you feel how quickly you are losing or gaining heat energy. Since your body is a bioreactor, it’s constantly producing heat and that heat is being radiated and convected away from you. But when you touch something that’s your own body temperature, all heat transfer stops because heat can’t flow between two things that are the same temperature.
That means if you were losing heat before on that patch of skin, and now you aren’t anymore, the amount of heat you were losing went down, and that feels to you like warmth.
Your body isn’t trying to tell whether something is the same temperature as you, or even if heat is flowing out of your body or into it, it’s trying to tell whether the heat flow out of your body is too fast or too slow. Another human, at your bodies skin temperature, is way to hot to dump heat into easily so they feel warm.
The skin is generally colder than the rest of the body by several degrees, but if you touch someone long enough it will heat up (acquire the same temperature as the core) because it cannot release that heat, and you will notice.
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