Temperature
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Ever wondered how you ‘feel’ temperature?
One more of our four ‘Somatosensory systems‘, the thermoreceptive system uses sensory receptors in your skin to detect temperature, and any changes to and extremes of it.
These receptors are special nerve cells that reach to the outer layers of our skin – and they are great at warning us to withdraw from painful heat or cold, but are also there to detect the more pleasant temperatures.
The temperature of collections – or how they’re interacted with – is rarely recorded. This could be a few reasons.
- Because recording temperature relies on how someone is personally affected by and perceives it, and it can change depending on the environment, it can be highly subjective.
- It can be assumed that others already know what temperature things will be.
- It’s not often seen as a useful or important piece of information to record temperature (for ‘record keeping’).
This page will help you to consider the dimensions of temperature and how it can be used to give a rich sensory experience of collections – both in collections management and interpretation.
So what is it that we actually ‘feel’?
Watch the video and/or read the transcript below for a brief introduction to thermoception.
Transcript
The temperature of regular stuff is basically just a measurement of ‘jiggliness‘ of the atoms and molecules that make that stuff up:
- More jiggling, higher temperature.
- Less jiggling, lower temperature.
Of course, when something’s at a high temperature, it feels hot, and when something’s at a low temperature, it feels cold. Right? Not exactly.
If you touch a piece of metal and a book that have been sitting in your fridge, the metal will feel much colder than the book. (Derek of Veritasium did a great video on this, but you really have to try it for yourself to believe it). The metal and the book are honestly at the same temperature as measured by a thermometer, but the metal feels colder.
This isn’t just a trick of the mind, though – we experience the metal as ‘colder’ than the book for a very physical reason:
- Metal is a conductor, and paper is an insulator
- So the energy, or ‘jiggliness’ of the molecules in our hands, is absorbed more quickly by the metal than by the book.
- Even though the book and the metal are at the same temperature, the metal causes the temperature of our hands to go down faster
- And thus, we experience the metal as being colder, because the temperature of our hands is what we really feel.
It’s like how, technically, a mercury thermometer really only measures its own temperature, and you can only indirectly measure temperatures of other things by putting them in thermal contact with it.
Similarly, the thermoreceptive nerves in our skin can only directly measure the temperature of the skin itself and not of anything else. So when we touch something, we don’t feel its temperature, but rather, we feel its effect on our skin. That is, how much and how quickly it transfers thermal energy – that’s the jiggling of molecules – to or from us.
The capacity to transfer thermal energy is also why a blast of steam from your stovetop can feel so much hotter than a blast of hot dry air from your oven, even though the oven has a higher temperature. Water vapour transfers more molecular jiggling to your skin than air by itself.
In fact, it’s tempting to say that ‘hot‘ and ‘cold’ are fundamentally different concepts from ‘high temperature’ and ‘low temperature’, even though we usually use the words interchangeably.
‘Hot’ really means ‘it gives off a lot of energy’ while ‘high temperature’ means ‘it has a lot of energy’.
You can record temperature in a few ways, based on scientific scales of measurement or how you perceive and are affected by it.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of categories and terminology that will help develop your sensory literacy for temperature.
Scientific temperature scale (e.g.)
- Fahrenheit
- Celsius
- Kelvin
Sensory temperature
Hot
- Boiling
- Feverish
- Roasting
- Sweltering
- Toasty
Cold
- Bitten
- Bitter
- Cool
- Chilly
- Freezing
Humidity
- Too/uncomfortably dry (<25%)
- Fairly dry (25-30%)
- Healthy average/comfortable (30-60%)
- Fairly humid (60-70%)
- Too/uncomfortably humid (>70%)
Change
- Increase (temperature rise)
- Decrease (temperature fall)
Time
- How long it is at that temperature?
- Over what period of time it changes?
- How long you notice it for?
Try out these exercises to discover new and interesting ways to think about and describe temperature.
NB please take extra care not to cause any damage to your body when trying these thermoreceptive exercises.
To try out how you would record this sense, try a couple of exercises:
- Choose something hot (e.g. a mug of tea), cold (a bottle of water from the fridge) and neutral (and item on your desk).
- Find an item, piece of art or some media content where you can give an evaluative reading of the temperature e.g. footage of a snow storm or a bed foot warmer.
Answer the following questions:
- What is the overriding temperature?
- How do you perceive it as such?
- How is it affecting you?
- Does it feel wet or dry?
- Does the temperature change?
- How long does it last?
To go a step further, think about other sensory systems it interacts with:
- Are there any sounds? (e.g. crunching snow)
- Can you taste anything? (e.g. hot chocolate to warm up)
- Are there any smells? (e.g. spices in a bazaar heated by the temperature)
- Can you touch anything? How does it feel? (e.g. goosebumps on your arm)
- Does it cause you any pain? (e.g. burning hands from holding the hot mug too long)
- Does it affect balance and movement? (e.g. sense fatigue from heat exhaustion)
- Is there something you would see related to this temperature? (e.g. bright sunshine, people playing outside)