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Hair-brained

I realize that I should not be making a thing of my hair at my age -I’m lucky I have any, let alone that it still has colour; but you should try to celebrate whatever you were awarded, don’t you think? I suppose I’ve always had curly hair though, so it’s not as if I won it at a track meet or anything. Actually I’ve never won anything even vaguely athletic, except perhaps the commiseration ribbon they used to hand out on high school field days to the also-rans to thank us for providing a race for the winners.  I don’t think they do that anymore, though; I’m not even sure if they still have field days.

But back to my hair. Before I ever made it to high school, I remember being embarrassed by my untameable hair for some reason. Somewhere around that time, perhaps because of the soldiers still coming home from Europe, military-style crew-cuts came into fashion and I desperately wanted one. My mother, on the other hand thought I was too young. By today’s prices, haircuts in those days were quite cheap: 50¢ for a regular child’s haircut; more for anything that required extra work for the barber (like a crew cut). Anyway, once a month, my mother would send me off to the neighbourhood barber with two quarters, and once a month I’d climb up on the barber’s chair and ask that he cut it “As short as you can for 50¢”. I said the same thing each time like a mantra. It never worked, of course, but each time the barber would smile, glance around the shop, and announce to anybody whose head was not buried in a comic book that he was about to work on “G, the 50¢ kid.” It was embarrassing for a 10 year old.

By the time I finally graduated into high school however, I had learned to ignore hair fashions, but I do remember a phase when straight, heavily Brylcreemed hair was in vogue with the guys. My far-too-curly hair was mocked as ‘Beethoven hair’. Given that the two of us shared a common birthday, the taunt did little to convince me to change. And anyway, there was a sort of consolation prize for a short kid like me with unruly hair, a silver lining for my usual tangles: if I backcombed it even a little, I looked taller.

They were never very tight curls when I was young, and as I’ve aged, they’ve become even more relaxed; I don’t have the same strength in my hands or legs either, so maybe I’m wearing out. However, it’s not at all clear to me whether I need to worry about it.

Still, I think was Socrates who once said that unexamined hair was not worth having; it occurred to me that perhaps mine bore looking into. My mother always claimed she had curly hair, but even as a child I couldn’t help noticing that she had far more curls after she came home from the hairdresser than in the weeks beforehand. I didn’t ask about it, though -I hadn’t read Socrates yet.

At any rate, surely the more important question to be examined is not whether curls are a heritable characteristic, but rather, why some hair is curly, and others not. Is there some Darwinian advantage to curls versus straight hair, and if so, was he simply envious? At first glance, I suppose it would make sense that the very presence of hair on the head would protect against sunburn -but on deeper reflection it occurred to me that unprotected heads would just spur the invention of hats, and any disadvantage would soon be lost; evolution tries to avoid stuff like losing if it can get out of it. Besides, that still doesn’t explain why there are different varieties of hair does it?

Of course, this is where Retirement comes into the picture: it’s a time when we’ve got nothing else to do but gather up the questions we’d scattered willy-nilly onto the ground in our youth. Retirement is a time when, as well as searching for those questions, we also rummage around for the answers between naps. Or, because most of us retirees are working with outdated cerebral equipment, we simply wait for a feasible hypothesis to appear in one of our smartphone apps.

Well anyway, I happened upon an app which reminded me that I’d actually once asked the question and then couldn’t remember whether I’d ever got an answer. You can’t expect me to remember everything, eh? As soon as I saw the headline I knew I had an answer, though: Curly Hair Keeps the Head Coolest -it was in the Smithsonian Magazine[i] of all places. Who’d have guessed? Well, actually it draws on a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but I’d never have looked in there without permission I don’t think.

The take home message in suitably simplified English, is that hairy-headedness may have evolved to stop our ancestors’ large brains from overheating -with curly hair cooling it more efficiently. Bald guys are at a significant disadvantage in the sun, for obvious reasons that we need not go into, but why is curly hair better than, well, the more common type that begs for Brylcreem (A little dab’ll do ya)?

One hypothesis is that although all kinds of hair protect the scalp from the sun, in hot humid conditions, curls might further reduce heating by creating a layer of air between the surface and the scalp. Another guess is that it saves water that we’d otherwise have to expend as sweat, or whatever. Frankly, I didn’t even know we sweated up there.

But, finding the answer to a question which, I have to admit I’d completely forgotten about, bodes well for my Retirement, don’t you think? I mean, who knows how many other answers are lying around just waiting for the questions I also couldn’t remember I’d asked? Maybe that’s what Wisdom is though; maybe it’s why elders have always been so revered: we make finding answers to forgotten questions seem so useful. Of course maybe that’s why we trip so much as well: there’s a lot of other stuff lying around in the grass by the time we make it this far in Life.

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/curly-hair-keeps-the-head-coolest-but-any-hair-is-better-than-none-180982424

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