the.com/dendrite
a neuron's grasping antenna, branching into thousands of arms just to hear you think
means A dendrite is the branching, treelike extension of a nerve cell that receives signals from other neurons and carries them toward the cell body.
from Straight from the Greek dendron, 'tree' — the same root that crowns 'rhododendron' and 'philodendron.' Anatomists looked down their microscopes at the neuron's frantic branching and saw, unmistakably, a tiny tree, so they named the limbs accordingly. The word also wandered into mineralogy, where 'dendritic' describes the fern-like crystal patterns that grow in stone, nature reaching for the same shape again and again.
- name origin
- Greek dendron, meaning tree
- spine count
- a single neuron grows tens of thousands
- crystal twins
- snowflakes and metals branch in identical patterns
- rewireable
- spines sprout and vanish as you learn
- signal direction
- they receive, while axons send
purkinje cell dendrites — cerebellar neurons with 200,000+ synaptic connections, the most densely connected cells in the brain
dendritic spines — tiny protrusions on dendrites where most excitatory synapses form, containing 70% of brain's synaptic connections