Storm Moves In

Last night a huge storm with heavy rain and strong winds moved its way into town.   Frequent thunder and lightning lit up the sky.  I doubt many people got much sleep.   It wasn’t long before all power went out.  The entire complex lost power until 4 pm the next day (Thursday) and stayed on for only four hours before the backup generators were turned off and everything went dark again…except for the light of the full moon. The storm has cleared the air and the temperature and humidity have dropped significantly.  This morning it was clear enough for me to watch the sunrise over the foothills of the Himalayan mountains.

Because the power was out, I could not teach using my computer or PowerPoint presentation.  Instead, we started the first period class with a review of the resting potential and action potential and then discussed the synapse, neurotransmitters and post-synaptic receptors.  To illustrate chemical transmission, each monk became a nerve cell:  one of their arms was a dendrite, their bodies were cell bodies, their other arms were axons and their hands attached to the “axon arms” were the nerve terminals.  I gave each monk a small rock and told them that it represented a neurotransmitter. 

The monks were divided into two teams and lined up so that the “terminal” of one monk was close to the “dendrite” of another monk.  The teams raced to see if their message could get from the first neuron to the last neuron in the shortest period of time.  It took the monks a few practice tries to understand the process, but they eventually had fun racing.

After tea, I described saltatory conduction and had the monks predict if a neuron insulated with myelin would send a signal faster than a neuron without myelin.  Their responses were mixed.  To illustrate this principle, I had 6 monks in one line, and the other 16 monks in another line.  Each line was the same distance (about 30 feet).  The group with only 6 monks was able to throw a ball to each other to represent the jumping of an action potential from node to node in a myelinated nerve fiber.  The other group of 16 monks had to pass the neuron to each other.  It was clear that action potentials that “jump” travel faster than those that do not jump.

During the next period, we started in on the senses.  First we talked about the abilities of other animals to sense the world.  This discussion emphasized that we only detect a small portion of the sensory world available to other animals.  Because the power was still out, I decided to go ahead with a hands-on experiment examining reaction time to  visual, auditory and touch stimuli.  This is the classic “ruler drop” experiment.  The monks had enough time to test each other and record their data, but we did not have time to discuss their results.  We will save that for tomorrow.