Can people feel the wetness? This question may seem strange when you think you can tell if an object is wet, but when you get into the details, things get complicated.
Twitter user @HannahPosted recently told her followers that humans don’t have a direct way to detect wetness, instead relying on other senses. This notion builds on a 2014 study and a number of other studies that have examined human perception of wetness since then.
In 2015, a team of researchers reported that “unlike insects, where moisture receptors (i.e. hygroreceptors) that serve moisture sensing (i.e. hygrosensation) are broadly defined”, humans do not have such a perception: It doesn’t seem to be equipped with specific receptors.”
As the study explains, humans don’t really have special water sensors. Instead, we seem to rely on a combination of other perceptions, as one team learned in 2014 by placing a variety of stimuli on volunteers’ hands and arms. For example, as the temperature of the objects in contact decreases, the feeling of wetness increases, suggesting that temperature plays a role in how we perceive wetness. It was also found in this study that hairy skin was more sensitive to wetness than non-hairy skin, and that wetness was dulled when nerves were blocked using an inflatable blood pressure cuff.
Lead author of the study, Dr. “Wetness is one of the most common sensations we experience, so people don’t question it,” Davide Filingeri told Re:action magazine in 2021. You can trick your brain into feeling wet when something is not wet, or you can actually trick your brain into feeling dry when something is wet,” he said. is cold. Or if you put on latex gloves and immerse your hand in water and then remove it again, you’ll likely feel wet on your hands, even though the moisture isn’t touching your skin.”
Studies have shown that “a multimodal integration of thermal (i.e. cold) and mechanical sensory inputs must occur to sense skin wetness,” he explains. “From a functional point of view, this is confirmed by the fact that when the activity of A-nerve fibers is selectively reduced, the degree of perceived wetness is also significantly reduced. From a central processing perspective, this was confirmed by the fact that warm-wet and neutral-wet stimuli were perceived as significantly less wet than the cold-wet stimulus, even though all stimuli had the same humidity levels.”
In short, technically, humans cannot sense wetness and can only understand wetness from other sensory inputs.
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