Kids: What causes 'brain freeze'?
Photo: Flickr user Kanko
Have you ever slurped an icy cold drink and felt ‘brain freeze’ — a killer headache?
What is happening is your body is trying to warm the area. It does that by dilating the blood vessels in the roof of your mouth – widening them to get more nice warm blood to the area. That dilating of the blood vessels is called vasodilation. And vasodilation can hurt. Think about when you come inside with freezing hands and feet after playing in the snow – you get the same kind of sharp pain as your blood vessels dilate to try to warm your extremities.
So why don’t you just feel the pain in your mouth? Why the headache? Your headache is referred pain carried from the nerves in your mouth through branches of one of your cranial nerves. What that means is that the nerves in the roof of your mouth connect with other branches of nerves that get widely distributed throughout your head. Those branches transmit the pain so that it’s “felt” as a headache.
