Tony Barone knew it might come. Intense, paralyzing pain that hits as unexpectedly as a flash flood and briefly sloshes about inside his head.
Still, it was 95 degrees in the shade. The air conditioning in his '89 Cavalier was on the fritz. So, Barone decided to risk it.
Moseying up to the Slurpee machine inside a 7-Eleven, he drew 22 ounces of Coke-flavored slush, sucked it dry and braced for impact.
The pain stood him up.
"Sometimes you feel it coming on and you go, `Is it ?' and you think you can stop it, but you can't," says Barone, 19, of Orlando. "It just creeps up, then it's too late -- `Ohhh! Brainfreeze!'"
We've all endured them: those lightning-flash headaches that feel as if someone plunged an ice pick into your eye. The culprit, in most cases, is an icy drink or ice cream that spawns the cold assault commonly known as "brainfreeze."
With summer's heat now in full force, we are ripe for an epidemic. Though brainfreeze is a global threat, and attacks across racial and gender lines, it doesn't rank on the World Health Organization's hit list or even merit a mention in medical journals. Curiously, the skull-splitting headache that is brainfreeze has escaped the scrutiny of hard scholarship, if not popular culture. So even doctors are at a loss to explain the phenomenon with incontrovertible authority.
"I don't think there's a definite answer," says Dr. William Lu, a neurosurgeon at Florida Hospital Neuroscience Institute in Orlando.
Theories abound, including one by Dr. Laligam Sekhar, clinical professor of neurosurgery at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He suggests brainfreeze might be a neurological reaction.
When consuming something extremely cold, his theory goes, the sensation of temperature registered in the mouth and throat is conveyed by pain sensors that travel along two nerves, the trigeminal and the glossopharyngeal, part of a group of brain nerves called cranial nerves.
The trigeminal, or the fifth cranial nerve, provides sensation to the face and services the muscles involved in chewing. The glossopharyngeal, or the ninth cranial nerve, among other things, services the pharynx and the tongue. These nerves are normally sensitive over a certain range of temperatures. Frigid foods and drinks may confuse them; the sensation registers as pain.
Translation: You gulp an Icee and soon a tiny troupe of Riverdancers commences to stomp on your nerves. That action, Lu says, "might be translated by the brain into the dull, hard ache that we feel as brainfreeze."
Brainfreeze is triggered when the mouth detects a drop in temperature of 10 to 20 degrees, Lu says. Usually a beverage or frozen treat chilled to at least 32 degrees does the trick.
Slurpees, for the record, spew from the machine at a teeth-chattering 28 degrees.
Edgy Web sites now bear the brainfreeze tag. Bands have adopted the name. Writers use the term. But it may have been the marketing whizzes at J. Walter Thompson, the Chicago ad agency that created 7-Eleven's "BrainFreeze -- So Good It Hurts" campaign in 1993, who helped propel the phrase into the pop culture vernacular.
The award-winning campaign featured TV spots featuring "BrainFreeze Boy," who thrilled at the somewhat painful joy that drinking a Slurpee brings, and offered gimmicks such as the Brainfreeze straw, fitted with a gooney-eyed brain encased in a block of ice.
The edgy campaign appealed to Generation X, which identified with BrainFreeze Boy, and thought cool the notion of pounding a Slurpee to summon a brainfreeze -- a term 7-Eleven trademarked in 1994.
"Those are people with an attitude -- it's cool to have a brainfreeze," says John Ryckevic, category manager for Slurpee. "It's a little painful, but it's something that's part of the experience."
Now the phrase has gone mainstream. Never was that more apparent than when the term landed on a David Letterman Top Ten List of "New York Mets excuses" in 1993 -- "drank Slurpee too fast; got a brainfreeze."
As the Letterman mention implies, brainfreeze isn't always so cool. Although a typical case peaks 30 to 60 seconds after exposure to the cold food or drink, sometimes the effects go beyond the short-lived ache.
Sometimes the reaction to the cold is so extreme it provokes a response in the vagus, or 10th cranial nerve, which passes through the neck. "It's like a shock -- the person throws their head back," says Sekhar. Sometimes the victim faints. But such reactions are uncommon, he says. More likely, though still rare, brainfreeze can trigger a headache if you are prone to migraines.
Doctors say the best way -- if strictly hit-and-miss -- to beat brainfreeze is to sip rather than slurp.
Homegrown remedies abound. For Alicia Roth, 17, brainfreezes come as a job hazard of sampling new flavors at her parents' TCBY shop in Winter Springs, Fla. She believes she has gained invaluable knowledge on actually stopping a brainfreeze.
"Pushing one's tongue to the roof of their mouth will stop the excruciating pain that is caused by Slurpees, ice cream, and [frozen yogurt]," she affirms. "I cannot explain the medical genius that is behind this revelation. I can only attest to its continued success."
Whether that approach works is a mystery best left to scientists to solve. In any case, Sekhar hopes that, for the time being, outlining the remote hazards of brainfreeze will have a chilling effect on extremists determined to test their limits, gulp after frosty gulp. But he knows, as with advisories on cigarettes, the facts on brainfreeze likely will leave some slushy drink enthusiasts cold.