As your personal ice cream/frozen snack consumption ramps up for summer (just the thought of last year's record-breaking temperatures gets the Mister Softee song stuck in our heads), science has come up with a way to harness the power of the brain freeze for good!
A new study, presented at yesterday's Experimental Biology 2012 meeting, has come up with a probable explanation for the brain freeze phenomenon, which could also help people suffering from migraines and traumatic brain injuries. Unfortunately, the test subjects in the experiment didn't get to eat a pint of ice cream for science. Instead, they sucked super-cold water through a straw, making sure it hit the roofs of their mouths, while the researchers blasted their brains with "transcranial Doppler." It may sound like a progressive rock band from Canada, but the scanning method let researchers track arterial blood flow within the brain-frozen brain. What they found was that brain freeze pain coincides with a rush of blood from the anterior cerebral artery, and it goes away when that artery contracts back down to normal size. The guess is that the pain comes from all the extra blood squeezing against your skull while your body tries to warm things back up--and that the same mechanism might cause migraines and pain associated with head injuries.
If that turns out to be the case, and migraines are a kind of longform brain freeze (permafrost?), this could help save a lot of people from migraine hell.
One pro tip, though, for enthusiastic ice cream eaters: order a small coffee with that cone. Drinking something hot will likely trigger that cerebral artery to contract back to normal size, ending your brain freeze.
Post stolen via Valet from bon appetit.
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