Ahhhhh...huh...Brain Freeze!

I'm sure many of you have had the pain in you head when you eat something cold, commonly known as "Brain Freeze" or "Ice-cream headaches". The term brain freeze was actually made popular by 7-Eleven to promote its Slurpee drink, but I guess people have made it more of a commonplace term.

Anyway, recently I've been having quite a number of brain freezes (possibly due to the hot weather) and so I decided to find out what causes it (and how to prevent it). Basically, brain freezes are a form of headache, just that they don't last as long and usually affect only a small portion of the head. When something cold touches the roof of your mouth on a hot day, it triggers a cold headache. The cause is a dilation of blood vessels in the head. The dilation is caused by a nerve center located above the roof of your mouth -- when this nerve center gets cold, it seems to over-react and tries to heat your brain.

So, to avoid brain freezes, you should try to keep cold stuff away from the roof of your mouth, or try to warm it up asap should a brain freeze happen (the simplest way is to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth).

Why a "temperature sensor" for the head is placed at the roof of the mouth, I don't know. But I think it is there for a reason, or at least evolution should have placed it there for a reason. Anyway, here's a quote from an article on "Ice Cream Headaches" for a more technical view.

All sorts of things can cause headache. For migraineurs, attacks can be provoked by chocolate, cheese, cured meats, or non-food such as stress or changes in sleep habits. Headaches can herald serious neurological disease. Some people have a benign type of headache provoked by coughing or, rarely, by coitus. Many people feel that headaches are caused by eye strain or chronic sinus problems, although probably they are not.

The most common cause of head pain is ice cream, occurring in one third of a randomly selected population.1 It occurs regardless of whether someone suffers from other types of headache. Children know all about ice cream headache, although I have found that they know it best by the descriptive term "brain freeze."

Click here for the full article.