"Brain breeze" is an intense and sudden headache which occurs usually due to eating ice cream too fast. It is also called ice cream headache or cold stimulus headache.
Scientifically it is known as sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, which means pain in the nerves around the face, sinuses and mouth roof.
It might not be as intense as migraine. It is usually categorized as true headache. It is stimulated by the intake of something very cold.
How does it happen?
The sensation of brain freeze occurs when a cold substance is consumed. When it reaches behind the nose and palate, it decreases the temperature around blood vessels which are close to back of the throat, i.e. internal carotid artery and interior cerebral artery. These both arteries supply most of the blood to our brain. Our body can’t afford rapid temperature changes and reacts. As a reaction our body has developed some mechanism to cope with these sudden temperature changes. One of these mechanism is constriction or tightening of blood vessels to preserve heat.
For example, when you eat ice cream, the blood vessels, present at the back of our throat constrict due to coldness, then they expand once they regain the temperature and warm up. This condition develops a phenomenon called referred pain. Referred pain is a pain which is felt in area other than actual source of pain. It is due to crossed signals during pain transmission. For example during heart attack, people feel pain in their left arms due to referred pain.
During brain freeze, the pain is referred from the mouth roof to forehead and scalp. Fortunately, this pain is short-lived and lasts for only few seconds to a minute. It is normally harmless and does not lead to any neurological disorders. But it is linked with migraines. The people who suffer from migraine, are more susceptible to brain freeze. This is because same type of nerves are responsible for both type of headaches.
There are some people who don’t develop brain freeze and science is unable to answer this question because there has not enough research been done about this topic.
How can we prevent brain freeze?
If we can’t exclude cold things like ice cream from our diet; then there is also a solution. We should eat cold things slowly and allow them to warm up little bit before they touch the back of our throat.
Another solution is after eating cold things, we should immediately take something warm.
Have you ever experienced the brain freeze condition?