Why you get ice cream headaches

Ice cream and icy poles might be some of the highlights of summer, but the enjoyment can quickly cool if you get a "brain freeze".

Scientifically known as sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia (try saying that out loud), it's that temporary throb that reverberates through the skull if we suck our Zooper Dooper too zealously.

According to The Conversation, the latest theory behind brain freezes is that it's caused by over-excitement in the trigeminal system, which is a big nerve that communicates sensory information from the head to the central nervous system.

A small study found that applying cold to the roof of the mouth seems to spark an increase in blood flow to the brain arteries in the front of the brain. Why this is important in an evolutionary sense is yet to be clearly understood.

For most people, having a cold mouth is not painful. However, people who are prone to migraines have a lower trigeminal system pain threshold and are much more prone to ice cream headaches (as if they didn't already have enough headaches to worry about).

One study recruited a group of people who suffered migraines, tension headaches or no headaches and asked them to put an ice-cube on the roof of their mouth for 90 seconds.

They found 74 percent of the migraine sufferers got temple pain from the exercise, compared to just 32 percent of people prone to other types of headaches and just 12 percent of people who don't normally experience headaches.

Ice cream headaches are not exactly life threatening so haven't been a major research funding priority, however US neuroscientist Dr Dwayne Godwin, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, says they are a useful research tool.

"We can't easily give people migraines or a cluster headache, but we can easily induce brain freeze without any long-term problems," Dr Godwin says.

"We can learn something about headache mechanisms and extend that to our understanding to develop better treatments for patients."

One thing that is for sure is that the longer you expose the roof of your mouth to the cold sensation, the more likely you are to suffer a brain freeze — so it's a good idea to take little licks, bites or sucks and swallow the cold stuff quickly.