Question: if the brain can't feal pain then why does it hurt when we get brain freeze?

Damien Hall answered on 20 Jun 2011:

I’d never heard of brain freeze, so I looked it up – interesting!

The reason why I’d never heard of it is that I don’t get it, thankfully

🙂

but it turns out that brain freeze is just a colourful name for something known more boringly as a ‘cold-stimulus headache’. It’s actually nothing to do with the brain! The reason why a cold-stimulus headache hurts is that the brain may not contain any pain receptors (it doesn’t), but the head is full of nerves and muscles that can feel pain. So it’s those that are hurting when you get brain freeze, not your brain itself, despite the name!

You can learn about the biology of it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-cream_headache

(this is what you get shown when you search for ‘brain freeze’ in Wikipedia).

It’s also interesting that no-one actually knows for sure what exactly causes brain freeze – that is, they know that some people get a headache when they eat cold foods quickly, but they don’t know exactly what is touching what to cause that headache. That’s one of the great things about science: you can always discover new things, and get the answers to questions that people actually want to know the answers to, like this one!