The most important cells in your brain are called neurons. They send and receive signals from other cells throughout the body, including other neurons. Dendrites are branching filaments that extend from the body of most neurons, and can be thought of as the pathways by which the neurons receive electrochemical stimulation, via synapses, and then transmit them to the body of the neuron (the soma).
The branching of dendrites extending outward from the neuron’s body is sometimes called “dendritic arborization”. Because they look like fuckin’ trees, as in trees in an arbor. The more you interact with the world around you, the more engaged and interested and stimulated you are by it, the more lush and leafy and dense your dendritic arbors are.
Actually, I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just regurgitating bits of what I read when I tried to figure out what the name of this Pittsburgh band was all about. What I’m pretty sure about, however, is that their debut EP Sylvan Matriarch caused my own dendritic arbors to grow in rampant fashion, and then burned a lot of them to the ground. (Sylvan, by the way, is a word that refers to something associated with forests.) Continue reading »
