Hi, I'm Dr.
Kathy Finan.
I am a professor of biology at College of DuPage and teach
anatomy and physiology.
The first thing to know is that
it has to do with the way that the nerves
that carry sensation from the face.
It's the way that they are arranged.
First of all, we have a lot of small nerves
that carry sensation from different parts of the face.
And by face we mean not just the skin of the face,
but also the structures of the face, like the roof of the mouth
and the nasal cavity.
So those spaces also have nerves that carry sensation.tem
There are nerves that carry sensation
specifically from the roof of the mouth, from the hard palate.
And those nerves are pretty small,s
but they merge into larger nerves
and eventually into a single nerve called the trigeminal nerve.
The trigeminal nerve carries
all the sensation from the face
into an area of the brain called the brain stem.
It's interesting that
the brain itself doesn't
have any sensory nerves in it.
So I sensations
that would occur in the brain
like pain or touch
or cold or hot sensations.
If the brain is affected itself,
there are no nerves to carry that information.
So when we talk about a brain freeze,
we're not actually experiencing pain in the brain itself.
We're experiencing pain that's coming from structures in the face
or in the skin of the head.
And these areas, as I said,
are served by this big sensory nerve called the trigeminal nerve.
The nervous system
has also a couple of quirks in it.
And one of them is called referred pain.
Referred pain is a phenomenon
where pain that is actually
coming from one part of the body
is interpreted by the brain as coming from a different part of the body.
And so referred
pain doesn't just happen in the head and the face,
but that's what we're talking about right now.
Let's go back to where this
pain sensation starts.
So when we eat something very cold
and it could be ice cream or it could be something like a slushy
and we take a big bite
or we eat it or drink it very quickly.
What happens is that we tend to use our tongue to press it up
against the roof of the mouth, which is called the palate.
And the palate has small branches
of these sensory nerves that are called Palatine nerves.
And the hard palate
also has a lot of blood vessels in it.
When something really cold is pressed up against the hard palate,
the blood vessels in the hard palate will vaso constrict,
meaning they, they constrict and they kind of go into a spasm.
So they will constrict themselves tightly just for a few seconds.
But that is enough to stimulate the Palatine nerves.
And that sensation
travels back through the trigeminal nerve and it ends up in the brainstem.
And because of the referred pain
phenomenon, the brain interprets this information
as coming from a different part of the face
or the forehead or even the back or sides of the head.
Most people say that it's centered in the forehead,
sometimes even behind the eyes.
But what's happening there is that the sensory information
is coming from the roof of the mouth through the Palatine nerves.
But because of referred pain, the brain interprets
that information is coming from another area
where there are different nerves that also feed
into the trigeminal nerve.
And so that is the
the pain sensation actually is coming from
the effect of blood vessels
in the in the hard palate undergoing a spasm
or a tightening when they get hit with something very, very cold.
There are a
couple of things that you can do to prevent a brain freeze.
One of which is
not to take such a big bite of something that's very cold.
A smaller bite is easier to handle in your mouth.
And it won't-
You can avoid pressing it against the roof of your mouth, the hard palate.
If you take a smaller bite, a large bite of ice cream will probably
get pressed up against the hard palate as you're getting ready to swallow it.
It's important to try to warm up the hard palate
so those blood vessels can relax
and your thumb being warm, pressing up against the hard
palate is going to warm up those blood vessels pretty quickly.
The other thing that you can do is that you can have a warm drink,
even something just like very warm water.
And if you're eating ice cream and you feel the pain,
take a sip of the warm water and make sure
that you get the warm water up to the hard palate.
And that usually relieves the pain in a few seconds.
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