Making dendrites?

I inquired of Aidan, our 3.5mo old, if he is "high-functioning today? "Soaking up everything like a sponge? Making dendrites?"

What are dedrites?

den·drite (dĕn'drīt') n.
A mineral crystallizing in another mineral in the form of a branching or treelike mark. A rock or mineral bearing such a mark or marks. A branched protoplasmic extension of a nerve cell that conducts impulses from adjacent cells inward toward the cell body. A single nerve may possess many dendrites. Also called dendron.

One of many branching, treelike mineral and inwardly conductive nerve cells. Also an image, a projection of something imagined scientifically, from a world that is too small to see without mechanical aid.

This is not an arguement about being scientific or trusting what other people belive or tell you; certainly not in the sense one might listen to someone argue the moon's existence is dubious because no one in the room has actually touched it. Rather, it suggests a collecting of the various ways something exists, an inquiry into the ways it is associated to other known images in a zone where generalities are helpful to understanding a field of experience rather than unhelpful, impeding the progress of rational analysis, for example.

So, I can't touch a dendrite in the same way I can touch my child. Nonetheless I inquire, more than a little humorously, after his dendrite production process, perhaps as a shorthand to remind myself what he may be up to right now, aside from napping, consuming milk, and excreting every known bodily fluid imaginable. This is certainly a process to which I can and do connect with the naked eye or hand.

Naked eye, hand, body, baby, parent - all within a more familiar frame than "dendrite," which is why, I guess, the question is funny, in so far as it is. Touching conveys a kind of reality linked to the way in which sensorial learning is received differently from faith in an abstraction, like "dendrite." In which most folks believes without direct experience, or accept the authority of an expert pronouncement of fact or definition.

Perhaps Nakedness is the basic unit of human measure since, regardless of the collectivity of an imagining unconscious, our conscious experience mostly extends as far as our sensorial range before needing additional encouragement.

How far can a foot travel and an arm reach? What of seeing stars with "the naked eye" and feeling the shape of this world as related by my personal and individual hands?

Both literal and obviously metaphorical nakedness are a part of being human.

"Some of them told us that they were standing naked before the gas chambers when they were suddenly ordered to get dressed and were sent to our camp."

"When it comes to sin, I think God wants us to come to him in much the same way that my wife came to me that night. He wants us to take it all off and stand there before him naked."

"Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law at Champaign, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War, said that "at least President Bush went through the motions" and got a Security Council resolution and authority from Congress under the War Powers Act to support that war. Clinton had neither, he said. "Clinton is standing naked before the world in this aggression, except for a British fig leaf," Boyle said."

"Before Lenny, comedy consisted of hacks who were doing "My girlfriend is so fat.." and "A Rabbi, a Polac, and a Greek walk into a bar..." type jokes. Lenny revolutionized the comedy scene by striping away the superficial banality and willingly standing naked before audiences exposing his thoughts and ideas. He paved the way for the Richard Pryor's, George Carlin's and Bill Hicks' of the world."

Hmm. I guess I'm getting in contact, through extensions from a central idea, with potentially related adjacent ideas that are conductive inward, as associative impulses, toward the imagined body. A dendritic process?