“His hands were wet and the eyes too!
The whole body was also heating up!
Fret not he was just eating some fries!
With hot and spicy chilli ketchup!”
Do you sweat and feel bad about it sometimes? Well, don’t! Your sweating makes you human! Now do not start panting like a dog just like our ancestors did!
Most furry mammals pant to regulate their body temperature. Other animals, like ectotherms — lizards, amphibians, and insects — have other behaviors that help keep them cool. Many mammals—among them, dogs, cats, and rats—perspire through the footpads on their paws; chimpanzees, macaques, and other primates are covered in sweat glands. Even horses and camels slick their skin in the heat!
We are the only mammal that relies on secreting water onto the surface of our skin to stay cool! But apparently in humanity’s past, we, too, likely panted to thermoregulate. Our closest primate relatives — chimpanzees and gorillas — dump excess body heat by panting, so it stands to reason that early human ancestors would have panted, too!
Detailed studies of sweating responses in our species have revealed that the whole process is a complex response as told by Desmond in his book The Naked Ape.
Most areas of the body surface begin to perspire freely under conditions of increased heat, and this is undoubtedly the original, basic response of the sweat-gland system.
But certain regions have become reactive to other types of stimulation and sweating can occur there regardless of the external temperature.
The eating of highly spiced foods, for example, produces its own special pattern of facial sweating!
Emotional stress quickly leads to sweating on the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, the armpits and sometimes also the forehead, but not on other parts of the body!
There is a further distinction in the areas of emotional sweating, the palms and the soles differing from the armpits and the forehead. The first two regions respond well only to emotional situations, whereas the last two react to both emotional and to temperature stimuli!
The moistening of the palms and soles during stress appears to have become a special feature of the ‘ready for anything’ response that the body gives when danger threatens.
Spitting on the hands before wielding an axe is, in a sense, the non-physio-logical equivalent of this process.
So sensitive is the palmar sweating response that whole communities or nations may show sudden increase in this reaction if their groups security is threatened in any way!
Apparently during a political crisis, when there was a temporary increase in the likelihood of nuclear war, all experiments into palmar sweating at a research institute had to be abandoned because the base level of the response had become so abnormal that the tests would have been meaningless!
The author concluded that having our palms read by a fortune-teller may not tell us much about the future, but having them read by a physiologist can certainly tell us something about our fears for the future! Of course if the person reading you is a detective like Byomkesh Bakshi like birthday celebrity Rajat Kapur then he may tell you much more!
Now sweat, I mean sweet dreams!
Shubh ratri!…
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