Eight smart limbs plus a big brain add up to a weird and wondrous kind of intelligence.
Philosopher Stefan Linquist of the University of Guelph in Ontario, who once studied octopus behavior, puts it like this: “When you work with fish, they have no idea they are in a tank, somewhere unnatural. With octopuses it is totally different. They know that they are inside this special place, and you are outside it. All their behaviors are affected by their awareness of captivity.” Linquist’s octopuses would mess around with their tank and deliberately plug the outflow valves by poking in their arms, perhaps to increase the water level.
In an octopus, the majority of neurons are in the arms themselves-nearly twice as many in total as in the central brain.
The nervous systems in each arm also include loops in the neurons that may give the arm a simple form of short-term memory, although it is not known what this system does for the octopus.
As I mentioned earlier, when you approach an octopus in the wild, in at least some species the octopus sends out one arm to inspect you-behavior that suggests a kind of deliberateness, an action guided by the brain.
Source: The Mind of an Octopus
Originally published at Cogly.
