Meet Nero
Nero is our mascot, and he is a brain cell: a little neuron with a serious thirst for knowledge.
What is a neuron?
Your brain is made of roughly 86 billion neurons. Each one is a tiny cell that passes signals to other neurons, and every thought, memory and skill you have comes from neurons talking to each other. Nero is one of them, drawn with a face. His name is short for neuron.
What are his little feety feeler things called?
The branching feelers around Nero are called dendrites. They are the part of a neuron that listens: they reach out and pick up signals from other neurons. A neuron also has one longer wire called an axon, which sends its own signal onwards. The place where a signal passes from one neuron to the next is called a synapse. The round middle of Nero is the cell body, which holds the nucleus.
So when we say Nero has connected with something, what we really mean is that a synapse has formed, or an existing one has got stronger.
How does he grow new connections?
When you learn something, your neurons change. Existing synapses get stronger, and new ones form, often on tiny bumps on the dendrites called dendritic spines. Scientists call this ability to change neuroplasticity, or synaptic plasticity when they mean the connections themselves. A well-known summary of an idea from the psychologist Donald Hebb is that neurons that fire together wire together: the more two neurons are active at the same time, the stronger the link between them becomes.
Connections you use stay strong, and ones you stop using weaken. That is one reason revision works, and why something you learned once and never thought about again fades.
Why does Nero love relatables?
A brand-new idea has nothing to connect to, so your brain has to build the link from scratch, and a weak link fades quickly. If you connect the new idea to something you already know well, it plugs into connections that are already strong. That is the whole idea behind That’s Relatable, and it is why Nero grows a new feeler every time an idea clicks. You can read more on the home page and in what “relatable” means.
Where you will spot him
- On the home page, where he starts confused with two feelers, has an “aha” moment when something clicks, and grows a new feeler each time until he is fully connected.
- In the footer, next to a quote from someone who is definitely not Socrates.
- On your account page, cheering on your progress.
- Inside buttons, spinning round while a new relatable is being written.
What the cartoon gets wrong
Nero is a simplification. A real neuron has only one axon, and it does not sprout a new feeler in a few seconds: the changes behind learning happen over minutes, days and nights of sleep, and much of it is the quiet strengthening of connections you cannot see. You also learn less by adding brain cells than by changing how the ones you have are connected. Still, the picture is right in the way that matters, which is that learning is connection.