Imagine a hot summer's day. The hottest day on record. While outside with friends, you decide to get something cold to quench your thirst. You go to the 7/11 across the street and buy a Slurpee, in your haste to cool down you quickly guzzle it down. Immediately, you feel a chill in the back of your throat; it feels good. Slowly, you feel a familiar pressure, it creeps up the back up your throat and makes your temples throb. You know this sensation well. The chill, then works its way further into your skull and envelopes your brain in what feels like the frozen squeeze of a catcher's mitt. Before you know, the chill has you in its vice grip. Powerless to the chill's icy grip, you have no choice but to endure its brief hold on you. Eventually the chill retreats---and then you do it again.
We've all succumbed to this phenomenon at one point in life, but what is it exactly? If there are no pain receptors in the brain, then why does a brain-freeze hurt and more importantly, how does it hurt?
Neuroscientist, Dwayne Goodwin, Ph.D., explains what a brain-freeze is and how it affects your brain. In an interview with Science Daily, he said, "Brain freeze is really a type of headache that is rapid in onset, but rapidly resolved as well,". "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."
A brain-freeze is the result of slurping a really cold drink or eating ice cream too fast rapidly changing the temperature in the back of the throat. The change in temperature affects the internal carotid artery in the back of the throat, which feeds blood to the brain and anterior cerebral artery, where brain tissue starts. This is why you feel that chill in the back of your throat, that creeps its way up your neck and into your head.
"The brain can't actually feel pain despite its billions of neurons, Goodwin said, but the pain associated with brain freeze is sensed by receptors in the outer covering of the brain called the meninges, where the two arteries meet. When the cold hits, it causes a dilation and contraction of these arteries and that's the sensation that the brain is interpreting as pain."
Sadly, there is no cure for brain-freeze, but there's still hope. If you want to avoid getting these headaches, scientists suggest you slow down on the slurping and eat your ice cream slowly, no matter how delicious it is. Be safe out there.
