Sorry if I’m misunderstanding, but this post seems ignorant of Newton’s law of cooling. If the brain is 1° warmer than the blood, then it should cool about twice as fast (in °C/minute) as if it’s 0.5° warmer than the blood, right? So you shouldn’t have tables listing “cooling rate” measured in °C/minute, but rather something like “cooling half-life” (measured in minutes) or “cooling decay rate” (measured in minutes⁻¹) or things like that. You’re dividing a cooling rate (°C/minute) by a temperature difference (°C) to get the proportionality coefficient, and the °C cancels out.
I think a lot of claims in this post are dubious on account of that error.
Re: Newton’s law of cooling—I’m not sure if it applies as much to the brain.
This is because the brain has other cooling mechanisms that kick in when overheating is detected. Yawning, panting, sweating/evaporative cooling from the forehead, and also blood flow to the brain can increase as well.
Yeah—you are right the cooling curve is definitely not linear—but I stand by my point that the data clearly shows that the brains heat generation ability greatly outstrips its cooling ability.
Sorry if I’m misunderstanding, but this post seems ignorant of Newton’s law of cooling. If the brain is 1° warmer than the blood, then it should cool about twice as fast (in °C/minute) as if it’s 0.5° warmer than the blood, right? So you shouldn’t have tables listing “cooling rate” measured in °C/minute, but rather something like “cooling half-life” (measured in minutes) or “cooling decay rate” (measured in minutes⁻¹) or things like that. You’re dividing a cooling rate (°C/minute) by a temperature difference (°C) to get the proportionality coefficient, and the °C cancels out.
I think a lot of claims in this post are dubious on account of that error.
Re: Newton’s law of cooling—I’m not sure if it applies as much to the brain.
This is because the brain has other cooling mechanisms that kick in when overheating is detected. Yawning, panting, sweating/evaporative cooling from the forehead, and also blood flow to the brain can increase as well.
Yeah—you are right the cooling curve is definitely not linear—but I stand by my point that the data clearly shows that the brains heat generation ability greatly outstrips its cooling ability.