so it's happened to almost all of us you're out on a nice warm summer day enjoying your favorite ice cream cone or a shake or maybe even a slushy and then your enjoyment is interrupted by the dreaded brain freeze also known as the ice cream headache or a cold stimulus headache or for those that take themselves very seriously ski no paletine ganglia neuralgia we probably won't use that one very much but in this video we are gonna talk about some of the details of brain freezes and the potential causes even is there anything we can do about them and obviously the relevant Anatomy and physiological responses so let's get to it so what causes a brain freeze well many of you will probably say duh it's eating cold things and that is true but let's go into a little bit more detail than that it's actually cold substances passing over the structure called the palate now the palate we're gonna show on this dissection here now if you take a look you can actually see that I'm tracing the whole palate here but the palate can actually be subdivided into a hard palate and a soft palate the hard palate is what people refer to as the roof of the mouth and it's made up of bone the anterior two-thirds is referred to as the maxillary bone where the posterior third of the hard palate is referred to as the Palatine bone again a pretty convenient name since it makes up the hard palate the soft palate back here is made up of actual muscle tissue covered by mucous membrane so when you look in the back of somebody's throat and you see the archway and in the middle you see that little hangy doodle that we call the uvula that's the soft palate now the palate is very well vascularized meaning it has a lot of blood vessels and that's gonna play into our story as well as all the nerve endings that are in the palate but before we move on from that I actually want to show you what it looks like on the skeleton okay so here is another view of the hard palate on our skeleton here and one of the things that I wanted to show were these holes you can see a hole here and a hole there now in anatomy the name for hole is foramen or foramina for these holes here have specific names the large one is called the greater Palatine foramen and the smaller one is called the lesser Palatine framin these holes are important because the nerves and the arteries come through those holes to flare on to the roof of the mouth and their names for the arteries in the nerves are actually pretty convenient the ones coming through the larger hole or the greater Palatine framin are called the greater Palatine arteries and the greater Palatine nerve same idea with the smaller hole the lesser Palatine arteries and a lesser Palatine nerve now what are the arteries do the arteries vascular rise or provide a blood supply to the roof of the mouth or the palate whereas the nerves provide sensation so what are the arteries and those nerves have to do with brain freeze was that cold substance that wonderful ice cream passes over the hard palate and those nerves those blood vessels will actually vasoconstrict those nerves are going to sense that and it also sends the temperature change and that's going to send a signal up through the brain now the problem is or the thing that we noticed with the brain freeze is we don't feel pain on the roof of our mouth we tend to fill it in other areas in the forehead the side of the head there's been some people who have mentioned that they killed on the back of their head but something has to be explaining why are we feeling pain or a sensation in the area that isn't actually being stimulated and that's a story of referred pain so to go a little bit deeper into this idea of referred pain I have to bring back those nerves that we mentioned the greater and the lesser Palatine nerves now those nerves are actually branches of a larger nerve called the trigeminal nerve the trigeminal nerve is this nerve that branches into three branches try and it's the name trigeminal to certain areas of the face and it's nicknamed the great sensory nerve of the face and those two nerves the greater and lesser Politan nerves bring sensation in and eventually join up with that larger nerve there so let's take a look at the skeleton here to kind of show you that pathway again I'm touching right here that foramen that I mentioned of the roof of the mouth the nerves will travel inside the bone here but if you were to zoom into this little fissure or this little crack right there you'd see that the nurse passed through this little nerve cluster called a ganglion or a group a little nerve cell bodies or neuron cell bodies called the ganglion now the only reason I'm bringing this up is because I mentioned that sometimes people refer to this headache as a sphenoid paletine ganglia neuralgia and the nerves just passed through that gangly I don't really think it's that great of a name I'm just being honest here because that ganglion doesn't have a ton to do with it's just kind of the nerves pass right through there and join up with the trigeminal nerve so now that we've established that those nerves from the roof of the mouth are gonna bring sensation in from the roof of the mouth as well as from the blood vessels and those go into the trigeminal nerve that's eventually going to make it back to the brain so I kind of want you to think about this remember the trigeminal nerve had three main branches I do this because one of the main branches goes to the forehead the other goes around the cheek and internal structures of the nose the nasal cavity in the roof of the mouth in this case and a lower third nerve goes down to the part of the jaw gets sensation from the skin of that area now even those three branches have further branches so kind of think that we're bringing in all this sensation back I want you to think of nerves just merging and merging and merging until we get to the three then eventually all three of those trigeminal nerve branches branch into one but you can actually see on this side of the brain here this thing that I'm pinching here is actually the root of the trigeminal nerve before it branches out into the three and then further branches out into the multiple other nerves that serve the face now all that sensation coming in through this nerve is actually gonna come in and relay if I trim this over into the brainstem specifically into this area called the medulla oblongata this region here now you can't really see much with the naked eye but if you were to look at this under the microscope you'd actually see this nucleus or this area where these neurons from the nerves come in and relay called the spinal trigeminal nucleus so why do I bring up another term that's kind of jargony and long called the spinal trigeminal nucleus well that's because everything from that nerve I shouldn't say everything the majority of sensation from that nerve like pain temperature and touch is coming in there and merging onto that nucleus so let's say a signal comes in from the roof of the mouth from ice cream and it goes in and hits that nucleus now what tends to happen is we don't actually feel the pain there which referred pain you often get a sensation of pain or reference from an area that's more used to getting stimulated if that makes sense so maybe the front of the head or around the cheek some people have mentioned around the eyes with brain freezes even from the back of the head and those areas are fine what's happening is the brains getting a sensation into that nucleus and it's like oh where am I used to feeling that sensation or so on the front of the head even though everything right here is just fine so is there anything that we can do to help with brain freezes I came across a couple of suggestions on just you know looking for home remedies or things that people have tried in the past and then also kind of got into the science of it and during one article I read a person suggested stop eating cold things nope it's not that one we're gonna keep eating ice cream because it's amazing so we might be able to slow down how fast were eating the ice cream that could potentially help but the things that are going to typically help with the brain freeze are can you warm the roof of the mouth again now it's not like many of you are eating ice cream and have a warm cup of tea next door that you can just slurp on if you get a brain freeze and so one of the fastest things you could potentially try is push the tongue to the roof of the mouth and that could warm the area warm those nerves up and warm those blood vessels and help when I was a little kid we had people tell me put your thumb at the roof of your mouth just told to me to use pressure but it's probably not the pressure that's really helping is probably just you know getting some work back onto the palate there to help reduce that you know type vasoconstriction of those blood vessels so those are some really quick things you could do is it worth it to use Tylenol or ibuprofen not really these headaches tend to last seconds to maybe minutes and they resolve pretty quickly once the temperatures restored to the palate so hopefully that gives you a better understanding of how brain freezes work again always comment subscribe let us know some of the things you guys want to see and we also now have a wizzy o account which means that you guys can get on and actually ask us personal questions and get a personalized video response so if you're interested in that go ahead and check that out we'll put that in the link below and goodbye [Laughter] [Music] you [Music]