To the Senses

On Wednesday, we started the day with another debate:  would taking a pill to make you smarter be cheating or not?  Neither group really answered the question, but instead they argued about what would happen if more people became intelligent.  One group thought that there were more evil people, not good people in the world.  They thought problems would occur if the evil people became more intelligent.  They also thought that if everyone became more intelligent, then no one would want to do jobs that did not require thinking such as cleaning bathrooms.   The other group countered that more smart people would counter any problems that evil people would make.  From the cheers and applause of the monks, it appeared to me that the winner was with the speakers who said that taking the smart pill would be cheating.

Ruler Drop

I opened the discussion about the senses with a general overview of how all of the senses provide information about what is in the environment, where it is, how much there is and how it is changing.  I tried to stress how our body has special cells (receptors) that respond to different signals like light, chemical and air pressure and showed pictures of different sensory receptors.  We then experimented with vision, hearing and touch by testing reaction time using the ruler drop.

Monks were given rulers and told to drop them so that another monk could catch it in three conditions:  1) eyes open when the ruler was dropped; 2) eyes closed but the word “drop” was said at the same time the ruler was dropped and 3) eyes closed but the foot was tapped at the same time the ruler was dropped.  For each condition, the monks had to perform the experiment three times and record their data.  They all averaged their data and wrote their numbers on the board at the front of the room.  Then we discussed are data and found that vision provided the fastest reaction time followed by sound and the touch.  A discussion about why the data looked this way followed.

In the afternoon we looked at the anatomy of the eye and followed the pathway of light through the cornea, pupil, and lens.  With a small magnifying glass, the monks drew a picture of the light projected through the lens and saw that the image is upside down and right side is reversed with the left side: this is what happens when light passes through the lens of the eye.  The monks also learned about the retina and its photoreceptors and explored the distribution of rods and cones by moving colored objects from the sides of their faces to the middle of their face.  They noticed that movement can be detected when things move toward the side, but they cannot see color or detail.  As the object is moved more toward the center of the head, the image’s color and detail can be seen because the image hits the part of the retina with cone receptors.

We ended the day with visual illusions including an afterimage of the flags of Tibet and the United States.  The monks really enjoyed the illusions and had fun arguing what they saw.  Tomorrow we will finish vision and move on to hearing and touch.  I hope we will also get to smell and taste and many other topics.  Time is getting short; I leave in three days!