Why metal feels colder than wood

Put your hand on a wooden table and then on a metal bar in the same room. The metal feels icy and the wood almost warm. But if you held a thermometer to them, they'd read the same: the temperature of the room.

What you feel isn't the object's coldness, but the speed at which it steals your heat. Metal is a great conductor: it pulls heat out of your skin very fast, and that rapid draining is what your brain reads as 'cold'. Wood conducts terribly, so it barely takes any heat and feels warmer.

The curious part is that it flips in summer. A metal buckle in the sun burns far more than the fabric of the belt, even though they're equally hot: now the metal pours heat into you at full speed. Your skin never measures temperature. It measures the traffic of heat.