Why don’t we feel our nails growing?
In:
It’s all about the way your body feels to begin with. You can feel someone touching your skin because you have special types of nerves that transmit the sensation of touch to your brain. These nerves are not present in your nails, kind of like how you can’t feel your hair growing. Pull a nail out though, and your pain receptiors under your nail would hurt like hell, just like when you pull a hair it’s your scalp that hurts, not the strain of hair.
There are no peripheral nerves in your nails or your hair. They would be required to feel anything happening to them. We feel pain if you pull hair or if your nail grew into your skin since that’s where your peripheral nerves start.
Edit: Your nails are also not living tissues (no nerves).
We feel things in general because evolution decided it was useful. For example, pain exists to alert you to things that cause damage.
Evolutionarily speaking, there isn’t much advantage in feeling your nails grow. Think about: what function would that sense serve? As a result, it never developed and you are blind to it, just as you are blind to a whole host of processes that go on in that biochemical machine you call a body.
Tl;dr We feel things because feeling them is useful. Know your nails are growing = not useful = no sense for it
There’s a variety of possible reasons:
First, we may not have nerve endings to sense nail growth.
Second, our brain might filter out sensations on a sub-conscious level. For example, we don’t know what our intestines are doing most of the time. They only get our attention when something abnormal is happening.
Third (and this may be an extension of the previous point), we acclimatize fairly easily. We may notice the smell of flowers when we first walk into a room, but after a while, that fragrance is ignored.
So basically, either or bodies don’t tell us, or we automatically ignore it as unimportant.
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