Thermal Stupidity Part 2

The Ten Minute Rule

I wrote in Part 1 about the clear (to me) scientific bias in favor of something called “heat”, conceived of as the degree of rapidity of the motion of molecules, and against a balanced polar concept of “cooling energy”.  I'd like to go further into the science of this sometime but for now let's turn to the angle of human experience.  I contend that this bias is rampant, even for those of us not connected with or versed in science today, and shows up in all kinds of frequent and mundane ways.

For one, this bias manifests in the way we live our daily lives.  In teaching about thermal physics, I used to tell a story to the students about one of the first encounters between European colonizers and Native Americans.  This story was told to me and so I don’t know its origin, but I have experienced it myself to be true today, and so I believe it.  The Dutch or English or French built a big bonfire and huddled around it in their many layered woolen clothes to ward out the cold.  The Indigenous People, dressed much more lightly in animal skins and with much more bare skin exposed, stayed well back from the fire because it was too warm.

I say I believe it because this story can be experienced simply by observing the wide variety of "thermal normative behavior" that different cultures exhibit today.  Many northern cultures value full immersion in freezing cold water as a health regimen.  Cultures in warmer climates sometimes wear less body-covering clothing, but not universally by any means. In some Middle Eastern and Asian countries where temperatures trend quite warm, folks can nevertheless wear clothing that might seem to those of us in North America to be stifling.

I myself feel most thermally comfortable in winter.  My favorite thing is to be outside working in very cold temps wearing my coveralls.  I'd choose this over shorts on a beach any day.  This makes my "thermal norm" quite different from a lot of other people.  When running into acquaintances on the street and making small talk, so often, the other person says something like “Boy, can’t wait for this cold weather to pass and things to warm again, right?”  Nope, I like it cold.

When I was growing up, I remember resisting my parents' and teachers' admonitions to wear gloves and a hat.  Some of that I chalk up to youthful exuberance and insensitivity. I really didn't used to feel cold back then like I do now.  But some of this I attribute to a phenomenon that still happens today.  That is the fact that most of us live in temperature-controlled environments nearly all the time. When I was a kid, I got away with not wearing proper clothing because I went from my house to a car, to school, then back home again.  I was, as I now realize, "thermally stupid".  “Stupid” is a pejorative word today, but it has an older more descriptive meaning, like when a person has been out in cold weather and feels "stupid from the cold".  It has the sense of losing touch with one's more sensitive perceptions, becoming dull and unresponsive.  This is the sense I mean when I say that as a kid enjoying temperature-controlled luxury wherever I went, I was thermally stupid.

I love a documentary on Netflix called "My Octopus Teacher" that follows a diver and photographer who befriends a wild octopus for an entire year off the coast of South Africa.  So much to be learned and so much beauty in this movie!  Related to our topic of discussion here, there is a small piece toward the beginning that really caught my attention: the waters into which he was diving were quite cold and he dove without a wetsuit.  He speaks in the movie about the icy feel of diving in and the discomfort, but then he says something like, "yet, after awhile I started to crave the cold".  

This is one example of what I'm pointing to.  Without pointing fingers at any particular person, I think we are, en masse, making ourselves voluntarily stupider through our near total reliance on temperature-controlled environments.  Offices, schools, gyms, pools, homes, you name it.  It's almost unthinkable to simply have a window open on a hot day, you “need” air conditioning.  Or we have propane heaters when we are outside.  Or electric vests and chemical warmers in our socks when we are out in the cold.

I don't want to imply that I'm some kind of polar bear swimmer or something. But I do like to jump into Lake Michigan as often as I can and challenge myself to be comfortable in a range of temperatures. I generally think of a weakening of my thermal tolerance as a weakening of my health.

When outside in the cold, I practice a “ten minute rule.”  Typically, when first going outside on a cold day, you experience that chill that makes goosebumps rise on your skin and feels like cold fingers down your neck and other unprotected areas.  Yet I find that, if I am not just sitting still doing nothing, but moving around normally and properly dressed, within ten minutes, my body has become entirely acclimated and I am comfortable.  For most people today, however, no one is willing to wait the ten minutes!  We want to avoid this temporary discomfort at all costs. We want to remote-start our cars, let them warm up, and then run out to them as fast as we can.

It goes further than just health for me.  If we spend all of our time seeking temperature-controlled spaces and complaining about winter weather, a couple things will happen.  First, we will basically not be able to go out into nature without being supremely uncomfortable, and a vicious cycle will keep us inside more and more.  And second, I suspect we will be hamstrung if we want to someday embrace etheric technologies and start living into a future where we leave hot technologies behind. 

We have heaters and air conditioning in our cars, the same in our houses and businesses.  We go “camping,” but bring along mobile homes that keep us thermally comfortable all the time.  I don’t think this is good for us.  I think it’s making us weaker, and stupider.

None of this should be surprising, since I am, after all, a self-proclaimed Pseudo-Luddite.  Well, you might say, go ahead and go outside all you like, Brian, and we will be comfortable in our climate-controlled spaces.  Except, in my observation, the more dependent one becomes on climate control, the more likely one is to be uncomfortable.  It goes like this:  if you seek total thermal comfortability (having no experience of being too hot, nor too cold, for any length of time), you reduce your range of thermal regulation that your body is in the practice of undergoing.  Then, as your range shrinks, you have an ever-smaller new range within which to work.

Another activity I often challenged students with on the first days of Thermal Physics was to stick their entire hand into ice water for 60 seconds!  For those that took me up on this challenge (most did!), there were an incredible number of sensations.  Tingling and pain and numbing in the hand.  But also warming and flushed sensations in the face and other extremities.  It turns out, our bodies are highly thermally sensitive and responsive, if we exercise them! You could try this yourself. . .if you want to!

I’ll take this further in the third post and dwell on how nature operates with a balance between warming and cooling that we should learn to observe and emulate.