Off the wall question about brain freezes

[Canoman]

I'm a chemical engineer who's always been interested in applying chemical engineering thinking towards things in the body. I took a few classes in college that gave me a "biomedical" specialty within chemical engineering, but my current job has nothing to do with bio stuff.

Anyway, I was just thinking about "brain freezes" and why they might happen. You know... That pain that you get when you eat ice cream too fast or drink a shake or slurpee too quickly.

Can you look at it like your throat is a counter-current flow heat exchanger? That's the image that pops into my head. When you swallow the cold stuff, it chills the blood that flows through your neck and then into your head and brain. Then, when the cooled blood hits gets to your head/brain you feel the temperature difference as a sudden headache. When the blood warms up in your head, the pain goes away...

I just thought about this and it made me chuckle.

I may be way off - I have no idea. I should look at the anatomy of a human neck to see if there's any chance of it happening that way.

 

[IRstuff]

Only if you were snorting it somehow.

The serious heat exchanger is in the nasal passages.

TTFN

 

[andyc0204]

The nerves in the roof of your mouth detect this sudden temperature drop and signals your brain to increase its bloodflow (vasodilation) in order to regulate the temp - its this rapid increase in brain blood volume that gives you the headache. (my engineering side suspects that the throat cooling theory has something to do with it but medics tend to go for the first explanation!)

 

[IRstuff]

not that Encarta is much of an authority, but there does seem to be some competing "explanations":

http://encarta.msn.com/column/questionbrainfreeze.asp

From BMJ.com

http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7091/1364

The BMJ article does imply that it's likely to be a reduction in blood flow rather than an increase, which makes sense. The homeostatic functions of the body, when stimulated with an external cold input, reduce blood flow to the extremities to minimize heat loss.

TTFN