What People Are Doing Wrong This Week: Heat Loss Through the Head
At least once every winter, someone will tell you how to wear a hat in cold weather because you lose 60% (or some other arbitrary percentage) of heat through your head. I bet someone, probably your mom, already told you that this year. But is this really so? Like many things in life, this is a more complex issue than it seems.
The origin of the myth of “heat loss through the head”
According to The Guardian , the source of the “heat loss through the head” myth is a “vaguely scientific” experiment conducted by the US military in the 1950s, in which subjects were dressed in cold weather suits designed to retain heat, but they no hats were provided. . In such situations, according to research, people lose most of their heat through their heads. Although this study did not look at normally dressed people wearing hats and not wearing hats, people started repeating the phrase “you lose most of your heat through your head” and it stuck.
Simply put, we “lose heat” depending on how much of our body is covered. Since the head accounts for about 9% of the skin’s surface area, we save about 9% of heat by wearing a hat. There are other variables – your head isn’t very oily but is covered in hair – that can change the boundaries a bit, but not wearing a hat results in about 7-10% body heat loss. But this is also complicated by the understanding that “heat loss” is not about how cold we are, but about how cold we think we are.
You’re as cold as you feel
Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht is a thermophysiologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada and a global expert on colds. To truly experience the cold, Dr. Popsicle (as he is known) jumped into frozen lakes and literally injected ice water into his veins. According to Dr. Giesbrecht, cold is somewhat subjective. “Your attitude really matters,” he told Accuweather . “If you say, ‘Oh, I’m going to be cold,’ you’ll just be very uncomfortable, as opposed to if you say, ‘It might be cold here, but I’m going to go cross-country skiing.’ …”Your mind is distracted because you are caught up in the activity.”
While you may feel less cold if you think warm thoughts, and can physically adapt to cold weather if exposed to it, there are limits. When it’s cold, the blood vessels in our arms and legs constrict. No matter how sunny your personality is, blood flows from your fingers and toes to warm your brain and other organs, and you will eventually get frostbite even if you think warm thoughts.
This physiological response may help explain why we feel like we should cover our heads first. According to hypothermia expert Dr. Daniel I. Sessler , the face, head and upper chest are five times more sensitive to temperature changes than other parts of the body. If they are exposed to cold temperatures, you will likely feel cold even if you are not actually cold. So maybe your mom was a little right after all, in a certain sense, with reservations.
Unless it’s so cold that you get frostbite, whether or not to wear a hat is a personal decision, but there’s usually an obvious answer: as Dr. Eskimo explains, “You won’t get hypothermia because of But then again, I have a very scientific view of this – if your head is cold, put on a hat.