Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation

BatFastard•about 3 hours ago

I found the article very interesting. Not click bait at all.

I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.

ortusdux•about 3 hours ago

Not only that, they have the highest ratio of brain-to-body-mass of any invertebrate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence

hermitcrab•about 1 hour ago

Yes, so maybe think twice before eating one.

bayganyo•20 minutes ago

I find it interesting how people justify (or not) whether to eat another animal.

PowerElectronix•about 1 hour ago

They're too delicious to consider how smart they are.

goatlover•about 2 hours ago

It's like 9 brains, one central one in the head and 8 semi-autonomous ones in the arms. Makes one wonder what an octopus consciousness is like. Is it distributed among the nine brains, or focused on the central one? If the latter then the arm-brains would be zombie minds. It's also possible the 8 arms have their own separate experiences.

We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine. We experience ourselves as a unified hole, allowing exceptions for certain conditions.

VorpalWay•44 minutes ago

> We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine.

Mostly yes. But we do have some processing that bypasses the brain: reflexes for example. The classic example is the kick reflex that doctors test with a small mallet on your knee. Or when you blink as something flies towards your eyes. It happens and your brain gets informed afterwards.

But there are degrees of non-conscious processing, from the heart beating by itself and your guts doing their things, to the breath which will be on autopilot until you take control over it, to entirely voluntary things like moving about your limbs (for healthy individuals).

Maybe the octopuses experience their disconnected brains somewhere on that spectra, where the limbs are semi-autonomous unless it focuses on them? (All we can do is speculate, there is no known way to learn the qualia of being an octupus.)

bookofjoe•about 1 hour ago

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [excellent]

https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...

cgriswald•about 1 hour ago

If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. It's fiction which explores different intelligences, with the second novel[0] dealing specifically with octopuses.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Ruin

fmjrey•about 3 hours ago

I would imagine their intelligence is directly proportional to the so many degrees of freedom the arms have for grasping, but don't ask which one came first, chicken or egg?

yieldcrv•32 minutes ago

lets splice in a gene fix for cephalopod senescence and get the invasion over with

Razengan•24 minutes ago

I have this headcanon that an ancient ape civilization was at war with cephalopods and they created a weapon of mass destruction that artificially gimped octopus lifespans :'(

throw310822•about 3 hours ago

Pure, shameless clickbait as usual from Smithsonian magazine.

> Although there is no direct evidence that the adaptation is linked to expanded octopus brainpower,

I.e. the entire connection between this mutation and octopus intelligence is made up. Not even a shred of justification.

jjk166•about 3 hours ago

Correlation does not imply causation and it's not even clear this qualifies as correlation.

Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation

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