Dendrite Tree

Enough about the trees, I know, I know.   I will stop obsessing about the trees in Boone, NC, after I post a photo of one particularly wonderful tree that holds court behind Newland Hall here at Appalachian State.  This intensely cool tree, when viewed from a nice distance, looks like an awesome and intricate diagram of cerebral neural dendrites.

The word dendrite comes from the Greek dendron, which means tree.  Neural dendrites are the branched projections of a neuron that act to conduct the electrochemical stimulation received from other neural cells to the cell body, or soma, of the neuron from which the dendrites project. Electrical stimulation is transmitted onto dendrites by upstream neurons via synapses, which are located at various points throughout the dendritic arbor. Dendrites play an important role in integrating the synaptic inputs within the cerebral cortex and in determining the extent to which action potentials are produced by the neuron.

Dendrites grow from the soma, or body, of a neuron.  When a person learns anything new, dendrite formation occurs.  In time, dendrites branch out, hence their name.  The tree, pictured, is a great example of what a neural dendrite system might look like – if we could see it! As educators, it is pretty cool to why what is happening inside of a student's brain when he or she really understands something new.

We are amid the countdown to the end of the Kellogg Institute, and everyone is busy packing and finishing last minute things.  I have gotten my practicum prospectus approved, and I am working on one other very important research prospectus. It is associated with some very exciting news I have about NCDE and an upcoming awesome opportunity I will have here.  

More on that, and all the other things going on around here, tomorrow!