What causes brain freeze?
This can occur when you quickly eat or drink something cold. However, your brain does not actually freeze. In the roof of your mouth there are lots of very sensitive nerves that protect your brain. When these nerves feel something cold like ice cream or a frozen drink, they think the brain is too cold and automatically send messages to the brain telling it to “warm up.” In order to get warm, blood vessels in the brain dilate, or swell. This causes the painful sensation that lasts about 30 to 50 seconds. About a third of the population experiences this type of pain at one time or another. People who get migraine and tension headaches may be more likely to feel pain after eating or drinking something cold. There are some things you can do to prevent the pain. As yummy as that ice cream or Slurpee may be, take your time between bites and sips. If you do feel pain, warm up your mouth by sipping something warm or touching the roof of your mouth with your tongue.
Brain Freeze While ice cream headaches are usually benign and brief, migraines are occasionally triggered by the cold stimulus. Ice cream headache has been studied as an example of referred pain. Experimenting on himself, Smith characterised the features of the headache. Applying crushed ice to the palate, he found that ipsilateral temporal and orbital pain developed 20-30 seconds later. Bilateral pain occurred when the stimulus was applied in the midline. The headache could be elicited only in hot weather; attempts to reproduce the pain during the winter were unsuccessful, even with use of a cold stimulus of the same temperature. Bird et al found a similar relation with respect to site of application of the cold substance and ipsilateral occurrence of the resultant pain. Some of their subjects also experienced an associated toothache. Raskin has suggested that ice cream headache may represent a model of migraine, in that both encompass disordered thresholds to sensory stimuli. It woul
