this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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I ate a too hot omelette and burnt the roof of my mouth again.

Now it feels sensitive and fragile, again.

Why did we as a species, whom are omnivores, develop such thin mouth roofs?

Hippos can crush entire watermelons with their mouths, why didn't we get a tough inner roof.

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Does the thickness skin impact it's ability to feel pain?

It doesn't. Burn a slip of paper with a lighter. Now burn an orange. Notice how the the outer layer reacts to the fire?

Your nerve endings also exist in the outer most layer (your mouth vs your deeper flesh)

Are you a mammal? Congratulations, you have TRPV1 receptors in your mucus membranes (avian supremacy ftw). They exist to keep potato brain mammals from eating hot things. These will fuck up your insides. Apparently enough of a problem that mammals needed them. Fun fact: this is enough of a problem that ancestral peppers evolved a means to exploit it and exclude mammals.

But off topic. There's no quantity of flesh that will make your mouth heat proof. Turns out first degree burns still hurt like fuck.