If I leave a glass of water on my nightstand overnight and drink it the next morning, the temperature feels notably cooler than that of the air surrounding me. What causes this sensation?
In: Biology
We don’t sense the absolute temperature of our surroundings. We sense the temperature of our own surface tissues and the rate at which it’s changing.
Our bodies are constantly generating heat and dumping it into the environment. Our skin exists at the boundary between the warm body and the cool environment, and its temperature is somewhere in between the two, dependent on the rate that heat is flowing. Water is approximately 1000 times denser than air, and has a much greater ability to absorb heat. Since water can carry away body heat much quicker than air, it causes the temperature of our skin to drop, which causes us to perceive that the water is cooler.
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