Finishing with the Basics

Today we finished up the basic anatomy of the brain:  right and left hemispheres, gray and white matter, the parietal, occipital, temporal and frontal lobes.  We also discussed the brains of other animals by first looking at some slides from the Comparative Mammalian Brain Museum.  The monks were challenged to guess which brain belonged to which animal.  Then we tried it again with cards.  Groups of five monks were each given a set of cards containing different animals and different brains.  Each group had to match the animal with the brain.  It took a few tries, but the monks were able to use the scale bars and their new knowledge about neuroanatomy to find the matches.

After tea, each monk made a brain hat from a print out of the right and left hemispheres.  First, the monks colored the four lobes of the brain and then they cut out each hemisphere and taped them together.  The activity would have been easier if the print outs were labeled in Tibetan, but they all had fun constructing their hats.  In fact, most of them wore their hats at lunch.  I made a hat too, but I did not wear it to lunch.