Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia

  Sounds like a very serious, if not fatal, condition doesn't it?  But sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia is something that all of us have experienced sometime in our lives.  Better known as brain freeze it occurs when we have consumed something too quickly that is very cold.  Who hasn't woofed down some ice cream and suffered the consequences of the pain that makes the forehead throb?  Or slurped up a slushie in haste only to feel a hurting sensation behind the eyes?

     Sometimes referred to as an ice cream headache, it is the sensation of pain caused by rapid temperature changes in your mouth.  In the most recent issue of Fine Cooking magazine the process is described thusly:

     "When you take a big bite of cold ice cream, blood vessels in the roof of your mouth constrict to reduce blood flow and heat loss.  After you swallow, the blood vessels quickly re-warm and dilate, increasing the blood flow and stimulating nearby pain receptors.  Your brain then sends out pain signals along your trigeminal nerve, the largest cranial nerve, and you experience pain behind your eyes and across your forehead, your jaw, and the back of your head."

     And as we all know, that sensation appears about 10 seconds after we have tasted that creamy frozen goodness.  Fortunately, it only lasts about half a minute or less.  The pain, by the way, is termed a referring pain, meaning we feel it somewhere other than where it really occurs.  While the actual cooling and re-warming happens in the palate, our brain interprets the pain as coming from the forehead as this photo depicts:

     As far as I know, no one has ever succumbed from this condition!