Science

Brain Freeze

Everything happens for a reason

Fact: ‘Brain freeze’ has a biological explanation.

It even has an unpronounceable name: sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. When something very cold touches the roof of your mouth (called the ‘palate’), it rapidly cools the blood in the small blood vessels around your sinuses. This causes them to constrict, and then to rapidly dilate again when the blood warms up again (which happens when you stop necking ice cream to take a breath).

Pain receptors in your mouth detect this relaxation of the blood vessels, but due to something called ‘referred pain’, it feels like the pain comes from your forehead, even though the signals originated in the roof of your mouth. This is because the same nerve carries signals for facial pain and palate pain, and because you’re just more used to being slapped in the face than in the roof of your mouth you assign this pain to your forehead as a force of habit. Researching brain freeze might seem pointless, but scientists actually use it as a model for other headaches that are not understood as well, such as migraines, so somewhere out there there’s probably a scientist that will pay you to eat ice cream as fast as possible. Time to sack off those consultancy applications. Another one of Mr. Aran Shaunak’s Little Bites of Science @BitesOfScience

From Issue 1647

18th Nov 2016

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Read more

Unionised staff reject final pay award and vote for strike action

News

Unionised staff reject final pay award and vote for strike action

Members of Imperial’s Joint Trade Unions (JTU) have voted in favour of strike action following a dispute with the College over its 2025/2026 pay award. The Imperial branch of the University and College Union (UCU) announced on Tuesday 16th September that 77% of its members had backed strike

By Guillaume Felix