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    I am particularly interested in our discussion of innate abilities that people/animals are born with. On Tuesday, we talked about how we are born with (and then fine-tune) certain CPGs that allow us to accomplish evolutionarily-important things. Just as we don't need to learn how to eat, we innately can flounder in water to keep ourselves afloat, and Jed knows how to fall off the couch. I remember a video that someone once sent me (the video was a joke), that explained that cats can fall from large heights (30-100 feet) but rarely survive short falls (10-30 feet) because they innately know how to "right" themselves...the implication was that it took the cats 3 stories to successfully flip over to land on their feet. Unfortunately I could not find the video to post for you all, but i did find this (which disproves that theory):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua4Gh_4XdwQ

 It's a pretty interesting video to watch. The cat is dropping but knows instinctively (because of the CPG) to right itself before it hits the ground. We've been talking about how our nervous system takes inputs from our senses and can use those in conjunction with pre-scripted patterns to generate future outputs. This makes me wonder: if you took a cat, blindfolded it (so it could not visually tell which way was up or down), then threw it up in the air, I wonder if it would orient itself upside down? So the cat appears to have a CPG that tells it: Wow, I'm suddenly falling, I need to right myself before I hit the ground. I'm guessing that blind cats also have this pattern engrained in them as well. This would suggest that the cat doesn't see the environment wooshing by (and the floor approaching), but rather senses the fall due to the acceleration. So, back to the idea of throwing the cat upwards...if it senses acceleration and then orients itself to absorb the impact, I hypothesize that the cat would orient itself upside-down when you throw it upwards. (as a side note, the physics part of me thinks that you would have to be accelerating the cat at a constant upwards rate of 2g, such that the cat would have the same perception as that of gravity normally has on you downwards). An interesting thought experiment to think about, nonetheless.

    So if we have these CPGs, and we're creating (and modifying) CPGs all the time, then what else can we do that we don't know about? Presumably, evolution has endowed us with life-saving instincts, so I would imagine that many of these patterns would emerge in their appropriate critical moment. Just as we know to duck when something is coming at us (as pointed out by the IMAX story), then we must also have other abilities engrained in us. Any ideas?