Why do we have cowlicks? Why can’t all of our hair just grow in the same? Also, where did the name come from?
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Cowlicks are caused by the way hair grows out of the follicle. Hair follicles grow in a spiral pattern, but some follicles may have a stronger spiral than others. That’s how you get cowlicks.
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“Assume the cow is a sphere.” I don’t know if you know that joke, but I swear it applies here.
First, imagine you have a flat square piece of fabric that has a “nap” to it, like suede or velour. You can stroke it so that all the hairs are happily lying down in the same direction.
Now imagine a ball covered in hair. It turns out that there are always at least two “singularities”, places where the the direction of the nap is forced to change abruptly. One way to do it is to comb all the hair “eastward” or “westward”, and end up with swirls at the north and south poles.
There’s a mathematical theorem (in topology, I reckon, but don’t rightly recall) that proves that you can’t comb a sphere without creating singularities like this. For this purpose, cows and humans and all other fur-bearing critters can be modeled as spheres. We all have cowlicks somewhere, because spheres do.
Why is our singulhairity on the top of our head? That part I don’t know. But there had to be one somewhere.
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So it’s a side-effect of cutting hair short. Our hair would have evolved based being somewhat longer in general so has qualities like elasticity based on the greater length and weight. When cut short those qualities instead can cause odd behaviours like the cow lick.
There’s a lot more to cowlicks (hair whorls) than hair just having to meet at some point.
The direction of a cowlick correlates to handedness. Your cowlick whorls clockwise, generally you are right handed. This has to do with the same laterality that makes people have a heart on the left. In horses and cows, they found that the animals that are right footed have hair whorls that are clockwise (to the right) In animals, cows specifically, the location of the cowlick correlates with the temperament of the animal. So what’s the connection? The skin and the nervous system develop from the same tissue, the same layer of cells in the embryo.
There may even be a connection between atypical hair whorls and atypical brain laterality and mental health issues like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are byproducts of developmental biology, that’s their connection to cowlicks. Babies born with structural abnormalities to the brain often have unusual hair whorls at birth. Children with developmental delays often have multiple parietal whorls. It’s like the cowlicks are giving you a peek at what the brain development of a baby may have resulted in. This isn’t to say that someone with a bunch of cowlicks definitely has abnormal structural development or developmental delays, it’s just linked because they came from the same tissue.
https://modernfarmer.com/2014/09/complexity-cow-lick/
https://clinicalgate.com/hair-disorders/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7362971/ This article talks about now even neurofibromatosis is linked with atypical hair whorls.
Probably what they said but wanted to add one of my kids has a cowlick in the same place as me.
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