I noticed this is also true for the facemasks I bought today
In: Biology
Skin and the fat tissue under it are both pretty soft and squishy. Having something squeezing it all day causes a bit of a memory foam effect. So when you take off the hat or mask after a few hours, it takes a little while for the skin to regain its normal shape; in the meantime you can still feel where it’s been compressed into a different shape.
So this was asked ages ago and I searched my comments to find my answer. Here:
Okay I just spent twenty minutes trying to find an explanation for this. I came across many colloquial terms to describe it like phantom hat or “Still Wearing A Hat” syndrome. But nothing scientific, so as I am a scientist (physiologist) I’ll give you a number of educated hypotheses that can explain this phenomenon but I cannot attest to their accuracy because I found no direct study about taking off a long-worn apparel.
What you describe has been reported by many for hats (especially tight caps), for sunglasses, and for watches. For a hat, when you wear one all day, the hair beneath gets deformed slightly and, after long enough, it holds that position. This deformation is actually sensed as a force in your scalp, and when you remove the hat but the hair remains in its deformed position, you continue to feel the hat. The hat itself doesn’t have much weight, so that isn’t the main stimulus the brain receives when wearing it. This is one potential mechanism, but it doesn’t explain the sunglasses or the watch. If you look for a pattern though, you’ll see all three of those examples exert prolonged pressure on the skin. So this made me think of two other hypotheses:
1) After removing a tight apparel (like the sunglasses pressing on your temples), the skin remains slightly pressed in, you can actually see this when the pressure is hard enough like when you wake up after sleeping on your face and it looks quite wrinkled for quite some time. In the skin you have mechanoreceptors that sense pressure amongst other stimuli. If the skin remains deformed, the pressure is still being applied to these proteins, so they continue evoking a signal in the attached neurons causing you to still feel the pressure from wearing a watch/sunglasses.
2) My second hypothesis on this revolves around neural adaptation and/or habituation. If something has been stimulating a given neuron for a long time, the neuron desensitizes and either stops firing altogether or fires in a low frequency signal that your brain ignores (for example, when you put your hand on the table, you feel the table but not for long). That’s neural adaptation. Habituation is when your brain actively ignores a stimulus because it doesn’t need to pay attention to all sensory information like how the noise becomes less annoying in a crowded room after a few minutes. I think wearing something that exerts pressure all day adapts the neurons, and after removing the stimulus the neurons remain desensitized for a while, making you feel nothing has changed because they haven’t reverted back to their natural firing (which is either a lack of firing or a different frequency firing). On the other hand, if this has to do with habituation, then your brain ignores the information that you’re wearing a hat all day, then when you remove it, it continues ignoring the actual sensation while maintaining a background thought that it’s there.
I am sorry I couldn’t give you a more pinpointed answer. It is possible that all these mechanisms are at play depending on the exact stimulus (tight vs loose hat, watch, etc.) but I have a lot to do and couldn’t spend more time searching the literature. Fun fact: street magicians often press on your wrist for a few seconds before taking off your watch, so you don’t notice it is gone right away as the sensation from their pressure will overwhelm the watch sensation and last after it’s gone.
When I take my hat off after wearing it for extended periods of time I don’t feel it. Maybe you’re wearing your hats a little too tight lol.
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