Rita Smilkstein
The brain is the Learning organ
When a person experiences, processes, practices a specific skill or concept or area of knowledge, specific dendrites, which look like twigs on a tree (dendrite, in fact means “tree-like”), grow on specific neurons. These neurons then connect with other specific neurons when specific dendrites connect at specific synapses to create a specific neural network that is that specific concept, skill, or area of knowledge.
The more their brains’ dendrites grow, connect, and create larger, more complex neural networks, the more learners know: The more they grow, the more they know; the more they know, the more they grow. In other words, the brain’s learning process, as researched and as described here, is that specific learning occurs when and because the brain constructs specific connections and thus reconstructs itself.
Just as each higher twig on a tree needs to grow on a twig that is already there, each new, higher level of knowledge and skill (I.e., larger neural network) needs to be constructed on a lower-level, foundational, prerequisite, preliminary neural network that is already there. A gap occurs when the prerequisite, lower-level neural network is missing and there is nothing the learner can connect to-nothing the learner can grow on-in order to make sense of and understand the new knowledge, concept, or skill.