One time, a dear family member told me of a trick for drinking ice water. I’m told that drinking it very slowly will tend to soften the discomfort of the very cold water hitting the stomach—the water warms up as you swallows.

Recently, I’ve found a situation where this doesn’t end well. If one is to drink some very cold ice water (think 32oz cup filled with ice cube, then add water), due to the cold temperature, the water may sooner cool your throat than warm up. The resulting shrinkage of blood and other liquid filled vessels causes tiny little bubbles to pop up on the tip of the tongue. my guess is the construction of blood vessels actually ends up pushing some blood back into the tongue causing the pressure increase.

The good news is that if you then take another sip of the same cold water and hold it on your tongue, the coldness causes the bubble to shrink. This is likely caused by one of several things: the liquid inside the bubbles shrinks due to cooling; the blood vessels in the tongue constricts and helps to equalize the pressure; or it could also be that the cold kills your sensations of pain.

In all cases this whole problem arose in the application of a symbolically learned heuristic (somebody told me) One often needs a reminder that what must have seemed to be very wise solutions to a physical problem in the past may not be useful to new problems due to the bounds of their effectiveness.