We started the day with a quick review of vision and colorblindness. We had a look at some Ishihara Colorblindness Test and played with the Stroop Test where people must say the color of an object or word. The nuns had no problem saying the colors of different colored squares, but when the Tibetan word for a particular color was printed in a different color, they had trouble saying that color.
We spent most of class time on the sense of touch by talking about different receptors in the skin, the neural pathway from a tactile receptor to the brain, and how different body areas are represented in the brain (somatosensory cortex). Our first experiment used two different grades of sandpaper. The nuns were asked to touch the finger of their neighbor with the different sandpapers and also to move the paper across the finger of their neighbor. These different types of stimulation provide different types of information. We also did a simple threshold determination for different parts of the body with the wisp of a cotton tipped swap. Our final experiment was to determine the 2-point discrimination threshold for the fingertip, hand, elbow, neck and calf. As expected, the smallest 2-point discrimination threshold was for the fingertip.
Because time was running out, I quickly switched to memory and learning and talked about classical and operate conditioning. No discussion of memory is complete without mentioning the hippocampus and the patient named H.M., the man who could never form new memories.
With only five minutes of class time remaining, I stopped teaching and thank the nuns for their attention and for inviting me to teach. I also offered the nuns a taste of Seattle with some "Applets and Cotlets." They seemed to enjoy the sweet treats and then it was off to lunch.
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