Day 3

After a solid 8 hours of sleep (the dogs were unusually quiet), I woke up at 5 am with a room without electricity.  Power outages are somewhat common here in north India and I hoped that this one would not last long.  I do use PowerPoint slides to teach, but know that the power can go out at any time.

When the first class of the day began, the power was still out.  Nevertheless, class must go on.  The nuns continued to build their brain hats and when everyone was finished, we went outside to the steps of the Sager Science Center for a group photo.

After we returned from the group photo, I answered a few of the questions that were submitted in the question box.  The first question asked about the best way to prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease later in life.  Another question asked about laws against drugs of abuse.  The last question asked about imagination.  All of these questions elicited much discussion.

I then tried a new activity. Yesterday, the nuns did an experiment with mirrors to show how the brain pays attention to movement.  The brain also pays attention to faces and many people see faces in inanimate objects.  So, I sent the nuns outside to record (on their phones or in their notebooks) objects with faces.  They had 15 minutes to find as many “faces” as possible.  Everyone then returned to the classroom to share what they found.

We were still without power, so it was on to the next topic: Comparative Neuroanatomy.  We had already discussed brain size and basic brain anatomy, but now we were going to compare the brains of different animals.  I gave groups of nuns 8 cards with photos of different animals and 8 cards with photos of these animals’ brain.  The object of the game was to match the brain with the animal.  I told the nuns to use the size of the brains, the appearance of the cortex (smooth or folded), and orientation of the brain with the spinal cord to help with the match. It told time for each group to make the correct matches, but eventually all groups were successful.

After tea break, the electricity was back on and it was time to discuss neurons and neurotransmission.  We talked about the basic parts of a neuron (dendrites, cell body, axon, axon terminals) and how neurons communicate with each other.  To model a neuron, we built string neurons.  Then it was upstairs to an open room to play the neurotransmission game where each nun became a neuron passing a bead (a neurotransmitter) in a chain of neurons. We set up two teams and had a race to see which team could pass their “message” the fastest.

Tomorrow we will get into the specifics of how electrical impulses (action potentials) are sent along axons and how chemical messages are used to communicate between neurons.