Finishing Vision

The monks and I finished up our discussion of vision with a demonstration of the blind spot and depth perception.  I had printed out strips of paper with a happy face on one side and a sad face on the other.  By looking across at the happy face and slowly moving the paper toward their faces, the monks noticed that the sad face disappeared.  

We talked about how light coming through the eyes hits the optic disk rather than photoreceptors to cause this small blind spot.  I then had the monks draw other pictures in their journal to see how the brain fills in the blind spot gap.  Some of the designs that the monks drew were great.

 To demonstrate how two eyes provide better depth perception than just one eye, the monks were divided into 4 groups.  Each group was given a paper ball.  The monks were told that they had to throw the ball into a bucket from several different distances using two eyes and then again with one eye.  As expected, they were more successful with two eyes.

We ended the day comparing response time to visual, auditory and touch stimulation with the ruler drop experiment.  The monks had to first catch a ruler when they saw it fall.  Then one monk closed his eyes and another monk dropped a ruler and said something at the same time or lightly touch the others monk’s foot.  The monks compared how long it took to catch the ruler in these three conditions.