Wetness

You can feel when your body is wet. It’s a very distinct sensation. Maybe you just got finished doing an ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and you’re wet right now. I’m not judging, I’m just saying you know. But that’s a pretty neat trick, researchers at Loughborough University and Oxylane Research say, because your skin has no receptors to directly sense wetness at all. They propose that our perceptions of wetness are “perceptual illusions” our brains associate with stimuli we have experienced when wet. The researchers theorized that when we sense wetness, what we’re really sensing is a combination of elements we do have receptors for, such as temperature, pressure and texture. They also projected that because hairy skin (like your forearm) is more sensitive to temperature than hairless skin (such as the palm of your hand) the sensation of wetness would be stronger there. And then they tested this theory on college students. What they found was that the students were more likely to perceive cold sensations as wet than