End of Week One!

Last night I woke up to the sound of a terrible dog fight.  It must have been 2 am.  Outside a pack of dogs was growling, barking and howling.  The noise went on for 5-10 minutes, but I was able to go back to sleep when the dogs had had enough.

Friday morning started with a 7 am breakfast of flat bread, yogurt/granola, not unlike my breakfast in Seattle.  After a bit of preparation time for my class, I took the 10 minute stroll up the path to the teaching building.  The monastics were already busy writing in their journals.

At 9:30 am, I took questions from the monastics about the previous day's class.  They had questions about visual illusions, infrared vision in snakes and the role of calcium in the release of neurotransmitters.  I had to stop the questions or we would never get to the material I had planned to cover.

We immediately launched into activities about depth perception.  They started by lining up two corks at the same distance from each other.  As expected, they found it was easier to judge distance using two eyes.  We followed this activity by gathering in an open room where I had set up four plastic containers.  The monks and nuns were divided into four teams and were stationed about 7 feet from the containers.  Each person in a team attempted to toss their corks into the container, first using two eyes, and then using only one eye.  Everyone had fun watching who made and who missed the basket.  They were also careful to make sure each person was the same distance from the container.

After tea, we started a discussion about hearing.  This included how changes in air pressure push on the eardrum and how this energy is carried to the cochlea where hair cells generate electrical signals that go to the brain.  I learned that the Tibetan word for cochlea is "Dragon."  Tempa, a senior monk, continued the lesson by illustrating how changes in frequency are related to pitch.

I finished the hearing activities with a game to demonstrate how two ears help us localize sound.  The monks formed a semicircle in the room while I chose one monk to be the experimental subject.  That monk blindfolded himself with part of his robe so he could not see.  I then gave a tuning fork to one of the monks in the semicircle.  When I pointed at that monk, he rang it.  The blindfolded monk had to point to the monk who he thought had the tuning fork.  With two ears, the blindfolded monk had little problem pointing in the direction of the sound.  However, with only one ear, the blindfolded monk was off by 8-10 monks!  We repeated the experiment several times with different monks ringing the tuning fork.  Everyone found this experiment to be very interesting.

The class ended with a neuroethical question that we will debate tomorrow morning:  what would happen is we were able to predict that a person would have a neurological disease?