If you’ve ever drunken anything extremely cold before you should notice that your tongue gets numb and its hard to talk. Also, many people drown in cold water because they cannot move their legs once they get too cold.
Now that its already winter in some places, some of you are probably notice how hard it is to write or use a key once your hands get cold.
So why is it that our muscles stop working, or why is it that we can’t control them when they’re cold?
Giving more of a WAG than a GQ level response -
I suspect the tongue bit is more that the sensation ability of the tongue is impacted by the cold and without adequate feedback it is hard to do the fine control needed to articulate clearly.
My WAG is that it is nerve dysfunction upon a fall into the icy cold that is the main culprit as well.
I defer to anyone with more facts to offer up though!
A couple things:
Muscle function is underlain by biochemical reactions. Those reactions are optimized to take place at standard body temperature. When the temperature falls below that, the reactions don’t happen as readily.
When a part of your body gets cold, the blood vessels in that part reflexively constrict. That is done to conserve heat. It deprives those areas of blood flow, oxygen delivery, and so forth. That impairs function.
Is this actually true? That a substantial number of people drown in cold water because they cannot move their legs because of the cold? I think it more likely that they drown because the cold water causes them to panic.
The drowning cause may or may not be true, but I can confirm that cold legs don’t move well at all. I once was touring on a motorcycle in very cold, wet weather. Like mid-30s cold. Because of an electric vest, heated handgrips and fairing, my core temperature was fine - no shivering ever, and no cognitive deficit - and I had no problem steering or working the controls. But the slipstream over my legs really chilled them; when I exited the highway for gas I had trouble downshifting, and when I got off the bike I had a lot of trouble walking. No pain or anything, it was just that my legs refused to do anything quickly. Just like trying to move your lips rapidly when you’ve been outside in the wintertime for a while (try transitioning quickly and repeatedly back and forth between a pucker and a smile). As Oly asserts, I’m pretty sure this had a lot to do with the slowness of the chemical reactions involved in releasing energy the muscles need for physical exertion.
Immersion in cold water will lead to hypothermia and unconsciousness relatively quickly. In water colder than 40 degrees, most people last 15-30 minutes before losing consciousness and are fairly useless before that due to loss of fine motor control and mental capacity. Hypothermia is the real killer in cold water, not drowning by itself.