3/6/2023 0 Comments Octopus brainNot unlike a certain shell-less, clawless, furless primate we could mention. So if the octopus wanted to go hunting in an ocean full of fish that are also hunting (sometimes for octopus), it had to become fiendishly clever. It has no bones, no shell, no scary spikes. Even octopuses know that octopuses are delicious.) What you can argue, though-and it's something Boal and other researchers have suggested-is that the octopus got smart because the octopus got soft (or vice versa). (Actually, they tend to be cannibalistic. There isn't an octopus culture you can't posit that their apparent ability to communicate with us stems from group behavior in the wild. These behaviors are especially impressive because octopuses are solitary creatures-you can't argue that they learn skills like tool use from their parents. Two, actually: This octopus was not going to tolerate crummy food-and maybe it even wanted Boal to understand that. Pausing above the outflow, it shot the stale squid out of its arms and down the drain, continuing its stare (or was it a glare?) at Boal, who got the message. This octopus locked eyes with her and moved slowly sideways to the drain in the front right corner of its tank. The food was nowhere to be seen, but the cephalopod was waiting for Boal-waiting and watching. When she finished, she walked back to the first octopus to see if it had gone for the meal. She doled it out anyway, walking down the line of tanks, dropping a subpar serving into each one. On the way to feed her octopus subjects one day, she suspected they might not like what was on offer: They preferred the very freshest of frozen squid, but the stuff she bore was a bit stale. Just ask Jean Boal, a behavioral researcher at Millersville University. The octopus displays sophisticated (some might say even irreverent) behavior in the lab too. The rest of the neurons are split between a central brain-surrounding the esophagus-and large optic lobes behind the eyes. The octopus's neurons aren't even concentrated in its head about two-thirds of its "brains" are distributed in its arms, dedicated to the fine operation of these limbs and each of their hundreds of suckers. If you were to measure octopus smarts by the number of neurons the creatures have (500 million to our almost 100 billion), they'd come up pretty dull. If you want to study an alien intelligence, Godfrey-Smith says, "octopuses are the closest thing we have." But our last common ancestor with the octopus was probably some kind of wormlike creature with eye spots that lived as many as 750 million years ago the octopus has a sophisticated intelligence that emerged from an almost entirely different genetic foundation. Even clever crows and ravens are at least vertebrates. "What's essential as opposed to an accident of history?" Think about it: Chimpanzees are, like us humans, primates. "Part of the problem in working out what's essential to intelligence in the brain is working out which are the features that, if you took them away, you would no longer have an intelligent system," says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher at CUNY who studies animal minds.
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