For example, dry ice. When you touch it, the temperature is so cold it burns. Same thing for hot, hot water. Skin, dude.
In: Biology
It is kind of like the old speedometers that only went to 85mph . If you had a fast enough car you could be going 120mph but your speedometer would only read 10mph.
I’m not entirely sure this analogy is accurate in this case but that is how I understand it. Your nerves are basically overloaded so they false report.
I think it might have something to do with the fact that we don’t sense temperature, but temperature differences/change with the respective nerves. If the sensation is too strong aka too low or too high suddenly, it’d overload.
I think when you touch some extremely hot or cold you’re just registering pain. You stop being able to perceive the relative temperature of the object if it’s so hot or cold as to damage your body.
Hot and cold are felt by special cells that “tell” the brain when you are touching a cold or warm thing. When the stimulus is too big they both scream at your brain that things are not alright, which leads to what is called paradoxical cold or paradoxical warmth. The phenomenon isn’t completely understood, mind you, but experts think that since the pain screaming “guys” are hooked on the same lines to the hot and cold “guys” your brain kinda mixes it all up in more extreme cases.
We’ve got both heat-sensing nerves and cold-sensing nerves that are triggered and various temperatures. But some of the cold-sensing nerves can also be triggered with things that are hot, alongside with the warm-sensing ones. This can give the wrong information at times. You can also trick your body into feeling like it’s burning when it’s not by mixing the two – in a psych class, we had a setup with ice water in one bucket and warm water in the other, and if you soaked one hand in each simultaneously and then transferred both to the same, whichever moved felt like it was burning. You can sometimes get the same feeling stepping into a warm shower with cold toes in the winter.
Edit: double-checked and fixed a few things
Latest Answers