Approximately in the UK do not have a tumble dryer. My flat is lucky enough to have a 2-in-1 that washes poorly and dries worse, so we mostly hang wet clothes from a drying rack in the living room (it鈥檚 also too small to afford us a more convenient drying location than the middle of our living space, but I digress). Because we also don鈥檛 turn the heat on very often, I鈥檓 often faced with trying to decipher if a hanging shirt is wet or cold or both. Why is it ?
Humans don鈥檛 actually have receptors to sense wetness (hygroreceptors) in the same way we have dedicated receptors for things like heat (thermoreceptors) or touch (mechanoreceptors). Instead, when we feel that something is wet, it鈥檚 the result of several other sensations being interpreted by our brains, and matched against our previous experiences of wet.
In his famous experiment, published in The American Journal of Psychology , I. Madison Bentley blindfolded volunteers and dipped their sheath-covered fingers into warm, lukewarm or cold water. No water touched the participants鈥� skin, yet they all clearly felt the sensation of wet. Bentley noticed that the perception was strongest with cold water.
Over a century later, we鈥檝e sussed out that humans鈥� sensation of wetness is dependent on . Some are tactile, like how we could tell a wet towel from a dry one just by touch. Or how it feels to have your hand underwater, with a slight pressure pushing on the limb from all sides.
Temperature plays a very important role in our perception of wetness. When water evaporates from our skin, the surface drops slightly in temperature. This mechanism is what makes sweating an effective method of cooling down. But it鈥檚 also as part of humans鈥� liability to confuse the sensations of wet and cold. In experiments, cold but dry stimuli designed to reproduce how quickly skin cools when wet, were as wet - 鈥渟upporting the hypothesis for which as humans we associate certain levels of skin cooling and cold sensation to the perception of wetness鈥�.
Interestingly enough, our perception of wetness is actually a , rather than something we鈥檙e born with!
With all that in mind, what should we do about the whole wet and/or cold laundry situation?
You鈥檒l want to use your face to feel the potentially wet laundry. , with regions like our forehead and cheeks being more sensitive to warmth than our torso.
And because humans are far to confuse warm and wet for warm and dry, try warming the shirt you鈥檙e trying to wear up a bit. Sometimes I鈥檒l heat one edge with a hairdryer. Sometimes I鈥檒l put it on, only to realize it really was wet when my body heats it up a bit.
