How can the heat of spontaneous human combustion not spread to nearby objects?
Your confusion lies in the sentence “How can such an intense heat not spread so far that it combusts the entire room as well?” You are presuming an intense heat for some reason. In my mind, the fact that nothing else burns means the heat was NOT intense. The best hypothesis for this phenomenon is that the fat in the body melts and flows into a substance that works like a wick, such as clothing or upholstery. The fire burns rather slowly and tamely so nearby temperatures don’t increase enough to flash combust anything. This is just like the fire in a candle wick not burning the parts of the wick that are just below the flame, or a candle burning down to nothing without significantly heating up whatever it was sitting on. The fat hypothesis explains why the head and limbs and associated clothes are unburned. You could do a simple experiment. Take a nice slab (not slices) of bacon and a long needle and thread a nice thick piece of cotton yarn through a fatty section. Warm the bacon to bod
