Those wrinkly fingers may actually give you a better grip when things get wet.
Stay in the bathtub long enough and something strange happens.
Your fingers wrinkle.
Your toes wrinkle.
And suddenly your hands look approximately 117 years old.
For a long time, there was a simple explanation:
Your skin absorbed water and swelled.
Except...that's not the whole story.
Scientists noticed something fascinating when they found that people with certain kinds of nerve damage didn't develop the same wrinkling response.
That was a pretty big clue.
Because if wrinkling were simply caused by water soaking into the skin, nerves shouldn't matter.
But apparently they do.
When your hands or feet stay in water for several minutes, your nervous system can signal tiny blood vessels beneath the skin to narrow.
As those blood vessels constrict, the volume underneath the surface changes.
The skin above it puckers.
And voilà: prune fingers.
But then researchers asked another question.
Why would our bodies bother doing this?
One intriguing possibility is grip.
Think about the tread on a tire. Those grooves help move water away from the surface so the tire can maintain better contact with the road.
Wrinkled fingertips may work somewhat similarly.
In experiments, people with water-wrinkled fingers have sometimes been able to handle wet objects more efficiently than people whose fingers weren't wrinkled.
That doesn't prove your fingers evolved specifically to become elite wet-rock collectors. But it does suggest those little grooves may offer a functional advantage.
Pruney fingers aren't simply passive soggy skin.
Your nervous system is actively involved.
So the next time you climb out of the pool and look down at those shriveled fingertips, don't insult them. They may simply be switching into wet-weather mode.
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