this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
33 points (97.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
38426 readers
211 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That was your sense of touch reacting to the heat
Touch encompasses a wide range of sensations like soft, prickly, sharp, hot, cold, etc, it’s basically the widest variety of sensation with the most stuff going on.
It’s possible to smell heat because that’s also a touch sensation occurring within your nose or a learned association of the sensation of smelling something hot
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/exploring-our-sense-touch-every-angle
Not directly related but your comment reminded me of it: did you know you can hear a difference in hot vs cold water?
And I don’t mean that as a general, “one can learn to hear it,” I mean it as, “this is a skill you there reading this probably have that you likely never realized you have.” (Unless you have also seen this video or something like it.)
You can also hear the difference between crispy and crunchy! And how full a bottle is of water as you fill it!
Or how full an opaque bottle of water is when you pick it up, just by feeling how it sloshes inside the container. Our brains are doing some serious math
I mean... I can hear the difference between boiling water and ice shifting so I guess that's true? 🤔
Not what I’m referring to. When pouring water into a cup, it makes a sound. And that sound is different if the water is hot vs cold. And you probably intuitively can tell the difference, even if you’ve never thought about it before.
Huh that’s neat!
It makes sense that it is the touch sensing the heat, but it’s not like a physical touch against an object so that’s the only reason I thought it could be treated differently for the purpose of this shower thought.
You're physically touching molecules of air and water vapor that got heated up by the cup. And also physically touching infrared photons emitted by the cup. The sensation of hot and cold is technically the sensation of receiving or losing energy of your body particles jiggling around.
That said, the other commenters are also right in that "touch" is just a catch-all term for all the different types of receptors our skin has
But it is. Heat is nothing but very fast Brownian motion of particles. So the kind of very warm light touch comes from fast moving particles in a gas emanating from your cup of Joe and touching your upper lip.