I just had an ice cream cone, and my brain felt like it was hit with an ice pick! But when I jump into a cold pool, my brain doesn’t seem to care. Why does eating cold stuff make my head hurt so much, but swimming in cold water doesn’t?
In: Biology
The brain uses the temperature sensing nerves at the back of the roof of your mouth to determine extreme air temperatures. Until we started including ice and smoothies and whatnot in our diets, this worked quite well. If those nerves sense “very cold” then the brain says “we’re somewhere very cold! we need more heat!” and starts bumping up the core temperature to combat the cold environment.
Brain Freeze is also called A Fever Headache.
The water you jumped into isn’t cold enough or didn’t reach the back of your throat. Maybe it did, though, and you recognized the headache but didn’t associate it with drinking or eating, so you didn’t notice it was the same thing.
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