A couple of months ago I participated in a fascinating experiment where we were attempting to make someone go into a hypothermic state. Our poor subject stripped to his skivvies in 39 degree temperatures, then got doused with a 5-gallon bucket of snow-water. Our fella was quite fit, without much body fat, and his thermogenic effect kicked in quite effectively. While he was shivering violently his body temperature rose to 99.5 degrees, and stayed there for quite some time. During this time he complained of being quite uncomfortable and wishing to get the experiment over and done with. As we were filming this for a TV program, the crew wasn't willing to end the experiment until we got our subject's temperature lower. To this point our subject had been standing, so we had him lie down in the snow. Within about 10 minutes his temperature had dropped to 97.2, which is still technically above hypothermia (considered 96 degrees core temp). At first he continued to complain of discomfort, but after another 10 minutes he suddenly became very comfortable with the idea of lying in the snow, and was willing to keep laying there as long as it took to get hypothermic "for the good of the show." The crew and I looked at each other and decided it was a good time to call it a show. Our subject never dropped below 97.2 core, but he rapidly began to decompensate mentally, and his shivering had slowed markedly. He also started feeling warmer, despite laying in the snow with nothing but wet cotton skivvies on. The most interesting thing was that we had to almost physically force him to get up off the snow and get into the hypo bag.

The lesson I took away from this is that you don't even need to be hypothermic, just about 1.5 degrees or so below normal, to start making very poor decisions.

MNS