Categorie
Scienza

Why do our hands get sweaty when anticipating strenuous activity, and are often the first things to sweat? What kind of survival situation is benefited by slippery but slightly cooler hands?

Bentornati ad un’altra eccezionale edizione delle domande di cultura generale!

Questa volta abbiamo cercato una curiosità scientifica:

Is this just poor adaptation? In many sports – e.g. weightlifting, climbing – and work activities people need to chalk up their hands or wear tape or gloves for grip, purely to counter this crappy response from their body. I would imagine in a fight or flight situation, evolving humans needed grip much more than they needed a marginal amount of heat dissipation from their hands.

Ed ecco le risposte degli esperti:

Ever spit on your hands to help get a better grip? That’s essentially the evolutionary mechanism at play here. Slightly wet hands especially if dirty, have slightly better grip. In a high stress flight situation back when we were in trees, that extra grip could mean life vs death.. and there just hasn’t been enough pressure since we left the trees for sweaty palms to be selected against so it’s mostly now an embarrassing annoyance when we’re anxious and our sympathetic nervous system doesn’t know why