THE sense of touch is one of our most important senses.
It allows us to experience the world and make sense of our surroundings regardless of what our other senses can (or cannot) sense.
Through our sense of touch we can feel the temperature, position, shape, texture, pressure and movement of any object we come in contact with.
But what it can't tell us is if it's wet or not.
Is it true that feeling wet is just an illusion?
Verdict:
TRUE
As unintuitive as it may sound, humans technically cannot feel 'wetness' as we don't have receptors in our skin to detect water.
Some animals, specifically insects, have special receptors, called hygroreceptors, which gives them the ability to detect humidity and water.
Most animals, including humans, do not have this receptor thus making it impossible for them to directly detect moisture.
The reason insects have specific receptors to detect water and humidity is most likely due to the danger it poses to them because of their size.
For something as small as an ant, getting trapped in a drop of water would be a death sentence as water becomes as sticky as tar to something small due to its surface tension.
This would make it highly advantageous for them to be able to detect it quickly in order to avoid it.
Saying that, even without a specific receptor for it, humans can somehow detect if something is wet or damp so a group of researchers from the UK decided to study the mechanisms behind it.
What the researchers at Loughborough University and Oxylane Research concluded was that wetness perception "is intertwined with our ability to sense cold temperature and tactile sensations such as pressure and texture."
Meaning that our brains will patch together these different sensory stimuli into a feeling that we perceive as "wetness."
This means that feeling wet is literally an illusion that our brain puts together to "fool" us into feeling wet.
Our brain's solution to detecting moisture however is not perfect and can be fooled, that is why sometimes it is hard for us to tell if a just washed towel is still wet or just cold.
References:
1. https://www.sciencedaily.
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.
3. https://onlinelibrary.
