Here's what extreme heat does to your body and brain

NOAA

The US is headed for a heat wave.

Across most of the US, as President Obama warned Wednesday, there's expected to be extreme heat.

And while it may feel like you're literally melting, there are actually some pretty interesting things that are going on inside your body when it's faced with extreme heat. 

To get some answers, Business Insider spoke with Matthew Cramer, a researcher at the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine in Texas who studies the effects of heat on the body.

Here's what goes down.  

Our body is good at producing a lot of heat, which means it tends to be good at cooling itself down in extreme heat.

So say you go into a 100 degree Fahrenheit room. "The first thing that will happen is that your skin starts to heat up," Cramer said.

As your skin gets heated, it sends signals to the brain to let it know that it's time to start sweating in order to release heat from inside the body out into the environment. It will also tell the brain to increase blood flow, so that it can push out heat that way too. The combination is aimed to cool your body down.

Source: MIT, BBC