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Getting your tongue stuck: The science behind a very cold mistake
You’ve done it too, haven’t you? Or maybe you know someone who has? Stuck their tongue to a piece of metal in the winter, even though they know it’s cold? But is it dangerous?
Touching your tongue to frozen metal must be a rite of passage if you’re a five-year-old boy from a cold place.
I It may be even more irresistible than jumping in puddles or tasting a newly frosted cake. But it is dangerous?
Researcher Anders Hagen Jarmund knows all about this particular temptation. Yes, he’s gotten his tongue stuck.
And he also knows just what to do in such a situation.
Is it dangerous to get your tongue stuck?
“I’m from a small place called Hattfjelldal, which is quite cold in the winter. I don’t remember if it was a signpost or a lamppost behind the school, but I remember licking it and my tongue got stuck,” says Jarmund.
Turns out he wasn’t alone.
“This was an experience that my friends had also had, actually, and then we were wondering if it was actually dangerous, getting your tongue stuck to a lamppost or railing,” he says.
The Norwegian government was in fact so concerned about the problem that they introduced regulations banning bare metal in playground equipment in 1998.
So he and a group of friends – who are also researchers – decided to find the answer to their question: Is it dangerous to freeze your tongue to cold metal?
Mostly not a problem, but... don't pull!
The short answer is that most of the time, licking a piece of frozen metal is probably not going to result in serious harm. You should warm up the metal where the tongue is stuck to loosen it, for example by breathing on it or using a little lukewarm water.
Whatever you do: Don't yank your tongue loose, Jarmund says.
“Try not to panic. I remember the panic – you’re standing there and your tongue is stuck to metal. But above all else: Don’t pull your tongue off too fast,” he says.
This is not just speculation. Jarmund and his friends have recently published two academic articles about the problem.
And one of the methods they used to find the answers involved pig tongues.
Nothing in the medical literature
To understand what happened next, you need to know a bit about Jarmund.
He has just completed his medical degree at NTNU and is now finishing his PhD on preeclampsia.
Alongside this, he works with data analysis in an NTNU research project that uses ultrasound to measure blood flow in infant brains.
Thus, it shouldn’t surprise you that he and his friends – his brother Ståle, Sofie Eline Tollefsen and Cristoffer Sakshaug, thought doing a little research project in their spare time would be fun.
They’d already done a thorough assessment of healthcare-related social media memes which they published in an academic journal. So why not tackle this question as well?
As far as they could tell, there was nothing in the medical literature that assessed the true danger of freezing your tongue to ice-cold metal.
In true research spirit, they therefore decided to fill this knowledge gap. Their quest would involve two important tools: a literature review, and the aforementioned pig tongues.
Uncovering a name: Tundra tongue
First, Jarmund and his colleagues conducted a thorough review of Scandinavian newspapers all the way back to 1748 to find stories about people freezing their tongues to cold metal.
The first mention they found was from 1845.
They combed through more than 17,000 hits and identified 856 reports. Some cases were so newsworthy that they merited coverage in more than one newspaper. That left 113 individual cases.
And they found a scientific study that gave the experience a name: Tundra tongue.
Five-year-old boys topped the list
The name was a fun find, but more importantly they had enough cases to identify trends.
The clearest finding: The prime age for getting your tongue stuck to frozen metal is five years old. And 60 per cent of the victims – though to be fair they could equally be called perpetrators – were boys.
“I’m not surprised the majority were boys. I’ve had my own little freezing experience,” says Jarmund.
In the end, what the researchers found was that most cases of tundra tongue had no or mild consequences.
But as many as 18 per cent of the cases resulted in visits to a doctor or hospital to deal with problems like avulsion. That’s the clinical way to describe a piece of your tongue getting torn off, such as when yanking it off a frozen piece of metal.
In search of volunteer tongues
After uncovering these frozen outcomes, the researchers decided to go further.
“We were curious, of course, and no one has studied this. We wanted to do something systematically. That’s what research is about. It was also a way for us to learn how to do this type of research,” says Jarmund.
Even though everyone in the group were researchers, none had previously conducted an experimental study of this kind. Among other things, they needed to find answers to:
- How can we study tongues that freeze to metal, preferably without using our own?
- How do we measure how much force is needed to tear a tongue loose?
- And where do we get enough volunteer tongues to achieve statistically significant results?
They assembled an interdisciplinary team, where a mechanical engineering researcher as well as professors in pathology and biophysics contributed. This had to be done properly.
A perfect solution
At the time, Jarmund’s brother, Ståle, was on the lookout for a good master’s project. And this seemed – quite literally – served on a platter.
They obtained the necessary equipment: multiple sensors, an infrared camera, and a setup that required quite a bit of tinkering to get everything synced up.
Among the key pieces of equipment was something called a force sensor, which measures pulling force. The researchers also donated saliva to lubricate the tongues.
But they didn’t want to volunteer their own tongues to the project, and they didn’t want to recruit volunteers either.
“We doubted any ethical committee would approve human volunteers for this,” Jarmund says.
After a debate about which animal species might have a tongue that was closest to human tongues, they settled on pig tongues. 84 tongues, to be exact.
A licensed slaughterhouse north of Trondheim willingly supplied them.
“And they were quite cheap. But I’m not sure there’s a huge market for pig tongues," the researcher says.
More than half lost a piece if they yanked, so don’t do it!
While Jarmund spent three months on a research exchange in warm, sunny California, the rest of the team spent days in the lab warming the tongues, cooling metal, and putting the two together.
They found – unsurprisingly – that pig tongues stuck well to frozen metal.
- In 54 per cent of the experiments, parts of the tongue were torn. The harder they pulled, the greater the likelihood that a piece of the tongue would get torn off.
- The greatest risk of having a piece of your tongue torn off occurred at temperatures between -5 and -15 °C.
But there was a surprise: At very low temperatures, the risk of avulsion decreased.
The researchers don’t know exactly why, but they think it’s because the tongue freezes so solidly that it can resist being torn when yanked free from the icy grip of frozen metal.
So, what exactly should you do when your five-year-old boy decides that he is unable to resist… and licks a lamppost when it’s -7.5 degrees?
The science is clear: Take a deep breath, don’t panic – and don’t yank your tongue off too fast.
References:
Jarmund et al. Demography and outcomes of frozen tongue: a scoping review of Scandinavian tundra tongue cases, International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijporl.2026.112740
Jarmund et al. The trauma of the tundra tongue: an experimental and computational study of lingual tissue damage following adhesion to a cold metal lamp post, Head & Face Medicine, 2026. DOI: 10.1186/s13005-025-00581-y
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Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
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