Is the laundry still damp, or just cold? Why your skin can’t tell the difference

By Kate Poole, Associate Professor in Physiology, UNSW
Felix Aplin, Lecturer, Department of Physiology and Translational Neuroscience Facility, School of Biomedical Sciences, UNSW

It’s a cold winter afternoon and you’ve just brought the washing in. Suddenly, you pause. Are these clothes a bit damp?

In the laundry basket, your hand can clearly distinguish the textures of silky shirts, woollen jumpers, cotton bed sheets. So why is it so hard to tell whether the washing is cold and damp, or just cold?

A sensible guess might be that our hands are numb from the cold, making it harder to detect wetness. The less intuitive reality is that we humans completely lack any specialised sensors that respond to “wetness” in the first place.

That’s…

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