What Causes Brain Freeze?

The Ice Cream Alarm System

During a hot summer day, you finally take a gigantic bite of cold ice cream. Within seconds, an intense, crushing sharp pain perfectly stabs you directly behind your eyes and forehead. This sudden agony is officially known in the medical world as sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, heavily popularly known as a brain freeze.

The true cause of this painful phenomenon does not happen inside your brain. It starts entirely inside your mouth. The upper roof of your mouth, natively called the palate, heavily contains highly sensitive blood vessels heavily wrapped in thick nerve clusters.

Referred Pain

When a freezing substance securely hits the upper palate rapidly, these highly sensitive blood vessels violently shrink to preserve internal body heat. This aggressive physical contraction fires an emergency signal completely down your trigeminal nerve, actively warning your body of an extreme sudden temperature drop.

So why does your forehead intensely hurt instead of your mouth? The trigeminal nerve is a massive communication highway that handles sensory signals for your entire face. When the distress signal shoots up the nervous pathway, the brain physically gets confused! It mistakenly interprets the sudden origin of the pain as coming from your upper forehead instead of the actual roof of your mouth. This strange biological phenomenon is called 'referred pain'.

The absolute fastest physical cure for an aggressive brain freeze is to actively press your warm flat tongue firmly upward directly against the roof of your mouth. This rapidly warms the aggressively cold frozen blood vessels and completely ends the painful distress signal.