Growing Dendrites
“Whaaaat?” you may be thinking as you sip your Sunday Morning Coffee. Grow some what? It’s Spring, sort of, and what we’re going to grow in our giant garden is a hot topic around our house. I, on the other hand, am working on projects about growing dendrites in the great garden known as the brain. You heard me. Dendrites.
So. Our brains resemble an intricate tree (I’m going full-out on this garden analogy, so bear with me). A dendrite (tree branch) is where a neuron receives input from other cells. Dendrites branch as they move towards their tips, just like tree branches do, and they even have leaf-like structures on them called spines. The axon (tree roots) is the output structure of the neuron; when a neuron wants to talk to another neuron, it sends an electrical message called an action potential throughout the entire axon. The soma (tree trunk) is the nucleus, where the neuron’s DNA is housed, and where proteins are made to be transported throughout the axon and dendrites.
Dendrites play a critical role in incorporating all of the information going on in your brain so the cells can respond appropriately. Bottom line? More dendrites good. Fewer dendrites not as good.
When we say, in a vernacular way, “Just over here growing some brain cells…” we’re talking about dendrites.
How do you grow dendrites? “The important thing is to be actively involved in areas unfamiliar to you,” says Arnold Scheibel, of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute. “Anything that’s intellectually challenging can probably serve as a kind of stimulus for dendritic growth, which means it adds to the computational reserves in your brain.” Um. Enough of the neuroscience lingo. In the vernacular:
Do puzzles. Crosswords, jigsaws, and problem-solving of any kind.
Learn to play a musical instrument or keep playing one you’re already proficient at, but try new tunes. First of all, trying anything new grows dendrites, but the act of playing the instrument while reading the music is high-level dendrite-growing activity.
Fix something. This is more problem-solving, but it’s also doing sorta the same thing as playing an instrument and reading music: you’re using your brain to problem-solve and your hands to put it in action.
The arts. The arts. The arts. Remember my blog entry from last week? This is another endorsement for offering the arts robustly in our schools (carceral and otherwise). Engaging in visual and performing arts, writing poetry, journaling, painting, drawing, singing, dancing, etc, etc, etc, are dendrite-growing hot houses.
Physical movement. Try a new sport, a new weight machine, a new class, a hike, a run, learn Salsa, dance in your kitchen. Moving is good. Moving in a way that requires you to learn new movement is even better.
Learn anything new. This is the secret ingredient in a garden of dendrites. Any time you learn something new, dendrites are budding.
Now imagine that you’re in charge of educational reform (correctional and otherwise). If you want your students to grow dendrites and want your staff to feel jazzed about watering that garden every day, you should start with sowing these seeds. Teachers need dendrite stimulation too. The great news about dendrites (as if the news so far isn’t mind-boggling. Pun intended) is that we’re never too old to grow new ones. So our staff and our aging students benefit from stimulating learning experiences as much as youngsters.
In carceral spaces, we should be offering a variety of course offerings that involve problem-solving, hands-on applications, kinesthetic movement, the arts, technology…and never discount the value of learning for learning’s sake. We really get focused on offering course work that’s employment-oriented, or diploma-oriented, but offering courses or seminars that are high-interest topics are valuable too. As an example, as a PBIS incentive, one of our incarcerated students wanted to learn about sailing. He asked for a magazine, so we got that, but since he had access to an APDS tablet every day, I found some videos that were free for download about a young couple who set out to sail around the world. They just filmed themselves every day, so you got to see the beauty of the world and also what it takes to live on a sail boat and how to operate a sail boat, in all kinds of real-life situations. I started uploading the short videos onto the tablets for this student, and then I had requests from every student in his housing unit to also have access, then more housing units, until finally we just made them available to everyone. I gotta admit I was surprised at the level of interest, and that I was overhearing conversations around the facility between residents who were using sailing jargon and debating how the couple should have solved this or that problem. I could almost see the dendrites popping up all around us. There was no diploma, no industry certification, nothing but learning about something most people knew absolutely nothing about. I live for those sort of moments as an educator. Don’t you?
My daughter is raising two beautiful babies. She and her husband decided she would be the one to quit working to tend to the little uns. Now, of course, we all live together (my son moved back to help out too), so a village is raising these babies, but my girl will occasionally say that she feels guilty for ‘wasting’ her bachelor’s and masters degrees. My response (after I get off the soap box about how raising two souls is the most important job you’ll ever have) is always that education is never wasted. Everything you learn in a formal or informal educational setting is responsible for growing the tree that is your brain, and the only way it’s wasted is if you stop growing additional branches.
What else can you offer at your school, campus, facility, or in your classroom to jump-start more growth in your students? In your own brain? You know what they say about the best way to learn something new, right? Teach it!
If you didn’t know what a dendrite was before this, I’m tipping my coffee cup to the universe and high-fiving myself for being responsible for that little dendrite bud growing in your brain right now. That was all me. Sort of.
Cheer ya’ll! Here’s to a week of learning new stuff!
