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 str