With the experiment conducted over 100 years ago, participants took part in the test we asked you to imagine and refused to believe that their fingers did not actually get wet. The feeling of wetness was definite, and although they could not see, they managed to perceive water as different from air.
The situation that makes our fingers feel wet without coming into contact with the liquid will make you rethink your perception of wetness. In fact, we cannot perceive wetness on its own, and our brain compensates for what is missing with complex patterns.
Let’s not let illusions fool us.
When you sweat, when it rains, when you swim, or when you unpleasantly spill your coffee on yourself… The hundreds of experiences we can list are not wrong, but the “wet” you perceive is given meaning by different factors.
There is a cooperation for wetness in our nerve cells, which we can call perception carriers. Our skin; It can detect textures, movement, temperature differences and stickiness. When the changes taking place on the skin surface are sent to our brain via nerves, it turns into a “perception illusion” that the surface is wet.
Have you ever not noticed that you were sweating?
In Bentley’s “synthetic experiment” at the beginning of the twentieth century, the sheathed finger was immersed in hot and cold water alternately, and the participants’ reaction to cold water was greater. Liquids such as sweat, which remain on the skin at body temperature and change in temperature over time, become detectable with the effect of cooling.
Properties such as the size of the area covered by the liquid on the skin and fabric and the stickiness of the liquid are also factors in being noticed. In addition, the pressure exerted by the liquid and our touching the wet area can be distinguished by A-type nerve cells.
Over the course of a hundred years, different scientists have come to different conclusions about wetness in experiments.
In one interesting experiment, hairy and hairless areas appear to have different responses to detecting wetness. Hairless areas, such as the palms, perceive wetness less than hairy areas.
In a different experiment conducted with a quantitative sensory test, it was tried to understand which cotton and different fabric types were perceived as wetter by wetting them and touching the skin at the same time. It has been observed that the intensity of wetness and the structure of the fabric affect the perception of wetness.
Why do scientists study wetness?
The neural connections of wetness, which is interpreted by the combination of changes such as contact and temperature difference, have recently begun to be associated. Research on how our skin wetness is perceived is important for basic and applied sciences. Starting from the interaction of our perceptions, we can open the door to clinical, industrial and thermal developments.
It is thought that it will be a guide in the treatment and cure of diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, which we know as MS disease and affects the central nervous system.
You may have noticed that the temperature varies in different parts of your body.
The distribution of this change and our nervous system can change the perception of the liquid in contact with our skin. As a result, we can use our elbow to understand the temperature of the water or our wrist to properly heat the milk in a baby’s bottle.
Theoretically, if you warm your hands for enough time, you may not feel the wetness of the coffee spilled on your hand but only experience a burning sensation, but we definitely do not recommend it. As a non-dangerous example, we can give the experience of it being very difficult to get into the water after waiting on the beach for a long time in summer.
It may help us survive.
The ability to notice the humidity of the environment and changes in skin wetness enables the development of our voluntary and involuntary behaviors. In this way, we increase our adaptation to the environment. We got very wet in the rain; We can say that it is ‘the pattern we learned as wetness’ that enables us to run home, get rid of wet clothes and make herbal tea, that is, starts the plot.
The fact that our contact with a wet surface, whether we see it with our eyes or not, comes to us through a network of connections in our brain, is just one of the surprising facts about the human body. We understand that the difficulty we have when stepping into the sea comes from the fact that wetness evokes a greater reaction when it is cold. Finally, getting used to the cold also takes attention to the wetness. You know what they say; “It feels cold at first, but once you get in, you’ll get used to it.”
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