Brain freeze: Why ice cream makes some scream

#BrainFreeze,#Popsicle #Slush #IceCream

Most people have likely experienced brain freeze — the debilitating, instantaneous pain in the temples after eating something frozen — but researchers didn't really understand what causes it, until now.

Previous studies have found that migraine sufferers are actually more likely to get brain freeze than people who don't get migraines. Because of this, the researchers thought the two might share some kind of common mechanism or cause, so they decided to use brain freeze to study migraines.

Headaches like migraines are difficult to study because they are unpredictable. Researchers aren't able to monitor a whole one from start to finish in the lab. They can give drugs to induce migraines, but those can also have side effects that interfere with the results. Brain freeze can quickly and easily be used to start a headache in the lab, and it also ends quickly, which makes monitoring the entire event easy.

The researchers brought on brain freeze in the lab by having 13 healthy volunteers sip ice water through a straw right up against the roof of their mouth. The volunteers raised their hands when they felt the familiar brain freeze come on, and raised them again once it disappeared.

The researchers monitored the blood flow through their brains using an ultrasound-like process on the skull. They saw that increased blood flow to the brain through a blood vessel called the anterior cerebral artery, which is located in the middle of the brain behind the eyes. This increase in flow and resulting increase in size in this artery brought on the pain associated with brain freeze.

When the artery constricts, reining in the response to this increased flow, the pain disappears. The dilation, then quick constriction, of this blood vessel may be a type of self-defense for the brain, the researchers suggested. "The brain is one of the relatively important organs in the body, and it needs to be working all the time," study researcher Jorge Serrador, of Harvard Medical School, said in a statement. "It's fairly sensitive to temperature, so vasodilation [the widening of the blood vessels ] might be moving warm blood inside tissue to make sure the brain stays warm."

This influx of blood can't be cleared as quickly as it is coming in during the brain freeze, so it could raise the pressure inside the skull and induce pain that way. As the pressure and temperature in the brain rise, the blood vessel constricts, reducing pressure in the brain before it reaches dangerous levels.

If other headaches work in the same way, drugs that stop these blood vessels from opening up, or that could make this blood vessel constrict could help treat them, the researchers say.

By Jennifer Walsh - MSMBC LiveScience

Comments

9 things about MLK's speech and the March on Washington

#MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #MarchonWashington #IHaveaDream "I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words in 1963, but this was not the speech that would go down as one of the most important addresses in US history. King spoke these words in Detroit, two months before he addressed a crowd of nearly 250,000 with his resounding "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs on August 28, 1963. Several of King's staff members actually tried to discourage him from using the same "I have a dream" refrain again. As we all know, that didn't happen. But how this pivotal speech was crafted is just one of several interesting facts about what is one of the most important moments in the 2...

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

#MLK #Assassination #MartinLutherKingJr #Memorial National Civil Rights Museum The Lorraine Motel where James Earl Ray assassinated King on April 4, 1968, is a complex of museums that trace the civil rights movement in the U.S. from the 17th century to the present. #MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #Memorial https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/

Psychologists Have Created A League Table Of Scary And Revolting Animals Phobias

#Psychology #MentalHealth #Phobias #Animalphobias #Spider #Snake #Dog You may be best advised not to read this article late at night or before you eat. Psychologists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Charles University in the Czech Republic have surveyed a large sample of non-clinical volunteers to gauge their reaction to 24 creatures that are commonly the source of specific animals phobias. The results, published in the British Journal of Psychology, contribute to our understanding of animal phobias and could prove incredibly useful to horror writers. Among the key findings is that spiders were unique in being both intensely fear- and disgust-inducing in equal measure. The researchers said this may be due to their mix of disgusting properties – including their “quirky ‘too-many-legs’ body plan” – combined with the fact they are “…omnipresent in our homes, often lurking in the hidden dark places and capable of fast unpredictable movement.” In other words, the intense ...

Coping With Moods: The Challenge of the Turbulent Mind

#Mood #Impulses #selfregulate #selfsoothe #Triple5LightTherapy #BlackMaleTherapist #Psychotherapy The power of moods and impulses can be overwhelming, but we can learn to self-regulate and self-soothe through awareness practices like meditation and mindfulness. By developing a healthy dialogue with our emotional nature, we can access deeper parts of ourselves and become more resilient in the face of stress and pressure. Rather than being swept away by our ever-shifting moods, we can learn to pause and reflect before acting. by Gillian McCann, Ph.D., and Gitte Bechsgaard, RP

Triple5Light Therapy

Search This Blog