Brain freeze is almost a part of the summer! Do you ever eat ice, drink a slurpie or consume anything cold too quick then get that numbing feeling in your head? The scientific term is actually sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia but for simplicity let’s stick with brain freeze.
How do we get a brain freeze?
A brain freeze is really the body’s way of telling you to slow down.
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin, Ph.D., explains how it works. “Brain freeze is really a type of headache that is rapid in onset, but rapidly resolved as well,” he said. “Our mouths are highly vascularized, including the tongue — that’s why we take our temperatures there. But drinking a cold beverage fast doesn’t give the mouth time to absorb the cold very well.”
When you eat ice cream or a Popsicle too fast you change the temperature in the back of your throat at the juncture of the internal carotoid artery, which feeds blood to the brain, and the anterior cerebral artery (Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center 2003). This sends blood to the your brain, and the anterior cerebral artery, which is where the brain tissue starts.
“One thing the brain doesn’t like is for things to change, and brain freeze is a mechanism to prevent you from doing that,” Godwin said.
Godwin talks about how your brain doesn’t actually feel pain, receptors in the outer covering of the brain causes dilation and contraction where the two arteries meet. This causes the sensation that the brain relays as pain.
Is there a cure for the brain freeze? Don’t drink your slurpie so quickly 😉
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “Neuroscientists explain how the sensation of brain freeze works.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 May 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522095335.htm>.
