Why Do People Get Ice Cream Headaches?

You may know an ice cream headache by one of its other names: brain freeze, a cold-stimulus headache, or sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. But no matter what you call it, it hurts like hell.
Brain freeze is brought on by the speedy consumption of cold beverages or food. According to Dr. Joseph Hulihan, a former assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the Temple University Health Sciences Center, ice cream is a very common cause of head pain, with about one third of a randomly selected population succumbing to ice cream headaches.