Merging objects

I’ve started my first serious project, it won’t be grand as im planin on using the model to practice on as my skills improve, but i plan to have curved-spikes coming out of his neck.Now I don’t want to extrude the spikes,but make them sepratly out of curves or something. Now how to i connect the spikes so thier part of the object?
edit: Also when extruding, if a bunch of vertices are next to eachother, and i extrue two, to make another face or square,and then i move one vertice over and extrude, is there a way to conect those two faces?

Select all your spikes and hit CTRL J
If you have two edges that are basically in the exact same place, you can select their vertices and hit Mesh>Vertices>Remove doubles, and they should join.

Thanks eagle, I’ll give this a try once I add some spikes to my model.