(no subject)

[gwillen]

The following thing intrigues me: If one of my hands is warm and one is cold, when I press them together I have trouble figuring out which is which. (Hint: The hand whose nerves are yelling "warm!" is the cold one, and vice versa. For some reason this is terribly counterintuitive...)

Comments

[dachte.livejournal.com]

Much of the way our perceptions of body work is based on change - if you touch a hot stove, you don't feel how cold your hands are by comparison, you feel the heat of the stove.

(I'm not sure if your intrigue is rhetorical or not, so...)

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if your intrigue is rhetorical or not

I'm not either. :-D

But I wouldn't have posted to LJ if I wasn't curious what people would say in response.

[lars-chan.livejournal.com]

At a lot of science centers they have an exhibit where you can put your hand across alternating warm/cold pipes. It feels like your hand is burning!!! :O

[physics-dude.livejournal.com]

OH NO THIS CONTENT IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR MINORS

That is interesting (I just tried it). I would have said it is a fallacy to say your hand feels warm, because you're actually sensing rate of heat transfer, not temperature. But at the same time, with the hands not together, the cold one feels cold, even though the air is transferring heat to it. It seems to me like we are sensitive to both the absolute and the delta, and that may be the confusion.

I also wonder if it has anything to do with the brain trying to position the sensation spatially, because if you touch some random object that is hot or cold, you think it's the object that is hot or cold, not your hand. Or it may be because your hands are laterally opposed - it seems somewhat less ambiguous if you touch your neck with a cold hand, for example. But I'm just throwing out random stuff.