Sometimes you take a T-shirt off the drying rack and can’t tell if it’s still damp or just chilly. Other times you sit on a metal bench and quickly jump up in disgust, only to realize there was never any water there at all. While these moments may seem trivial, they actually point to a slightly sneaky thing about how our senses work.
We like to believe we experience the world directly: cold is cold, wet is wet, and our skin knows the difference. But that’s not really how it goes. The truth is that the human body is actually not equipped to know wet from cold.
But why is this the case? Click on to find out.