Don't Forget

Golden Temple

Before the start of the lesson about learning and memory, I took another walk around the grounds of the Namdroling Monastery.  The monastery is very beautiful with its temple buildings and well kept gardens.

The lesson about learning and memory began with a discussion of the different types of memory (sensory memory, short term memory, long term memory; declarative memory, procedural memory).  I also mentioned the famous case of HM who had portions of his temporal lobe and hippocampus removed.  The monks had heard me talk about Alzheimer’s disease earlier in the week so we compared the behavior of people with different types of memory problems.

We also did experiments to test their memory.  For example, I had the translator read a list of 20 words and asked the monks to remember as many as possible.  We created a word position curve to see what words they remembered.  I expected to see earlier words on the list and later words on the list remembered better than the other words, but there were quite a few words in the middle of the list that they remembered well.  One of these words was butterfly.  I asked them why they remembered butterfly and they said because I had mentioned earlier in the week how butterflies taste with their feet.

Outside Golden Temple

We also compared memory for concrete, abstract and nonsense words.  All of the monks had trouble remembering nonsense words such as “jibma” and “rovtib”.  Most people remember concrete words (e.g., house, pencil, car) between than abstract words (e.g., trust, faith, honesty), but the monks found that the two lists were equal in their difficulty to remember.  They also asked about the language of the nonsense words.  They all laughed when I said it was not Tibetan or English; rather it was “Eric Language.”

After five minutes of journal writing, I told the monks that my own memory was still good --  I had not forgotten about tea time and that they were welcome to take a break.