What Is a Brain Freeze and How To Cure It!

It's one of those signs of summer: You're happily eat an ice cream cone when whammy! The icy cold snakes up your teeth, seemingly into your brain to become an ice cream brain freeze. Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin explains everything you ever wanted to know about brain freezes.

What is ice cream brain freeze? That painful feeling you get when you quickly eat or drink something that is icy cold actually has a medical term: sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.

Why does brain freeze happen? It's actually your body's way of putting on the brakes, telling you to slow down and take it easy.

How does it happen? When you slurp a really cold drink or eat ice cream too fast, you are rapidly changing the temperature in the back of the throat at the juncture of the internal carotoid artery, which feeds blood to the brain, and the anterior cerebral artery, which is where brain tissue starts. "One thing the brain doesn't like is for things to change, and brain freeze is a mechanism to prevent you from doing that," Godwin said.

How to cure a brain freeze: Immediately stop drinking the icy cold beverage and jam your tongue up to the roof of your mouth. Your tongue is warm and will help normalize the temperature in your mouth.