Natures wonders: the mind of the octopus (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 13, 2016, 00:47 (2901 days ago) @ David Turell

This amazing animal has five hundred million neurons spread down all eight legs, in a fairly large brain that can recognize people, and camera eyes with a lens that focuses on the retina. A huge article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/?WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_2016...

"The majority of neurons in an octopus are found in the arms, which can independently taste and touch and also control basic motions without input from the brain.

"Octopus brains and vertebrate brains have no common anatomy but support a variety of similar features, including forms of short- and long-term memory, versions of sleep, and the capacities to recognize individual people and explore objects through play.

"Octopuses and their relatives (cuttlefish and squid) represent an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals.... they represent an entirely independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

***

"Octopuses have done fairly well on tests of their intelligence in the laboratory, without showing themselves to be Einsteins. They can learn to navigate simple mazes. They can use visual cues to discriminate between two familiar environments and then take the best route toward some reward. They can learn to unscrew jars to obtain the food inside—even from the inside out. But octopuses are slow learners in all these contexts.

***

"in at least two aquariums, octopuses have learned to turn off the lights by squirting jets of water at the bulbs and short-circuiting the power supply. At the University of Otago in New Zealand, this game became so expensive that the octopus had to be released back to the wild.

***

"Anecdotally at least, it has long appeared that captive octopuses can recognize and behave differently toward individual human keepers. In the same lab in New Zealand that had the “lights-out” problem, an octopus took a dislike to one member of the staff, for no obvious reason. Whenever that person passed by on the walkway behind the tank, she received a half-gallon jet of water down the back of her neck.

***

"Roland C. Anderson and his colleagues at the Seattle Aquarium tested recognition in giant Pacific octopuses in an experiment that involved a “nice” keeper who regularly fed eight animals and a “mean” keeper who touched them with a bristly stick. After two weeks, all the octopuses behaved differently toward the two keepers, confirming that they can distinguish among individual people, even when they wear identical uniforms.

***

“'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. Of course, this flooded the entire lab.

"Another octopus behavior that has made its way from anecdote to experimental investigation is play....Some octopuses—and only some—will spend time blowing pill bottles around their tank with their jet, “bouncing” the bottle back and forth on the stream of water coming from the tank's intake valve.

***

"How does an octopus's brain relate to its arms? Early work looking at both behavior and anatomy gave the impression that the arms enjoyed considerable independence...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.

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" In 2011 researchers Tamar Gutnick and Ruth Byrne, along with Hochner and Kuba, conducted a very clever experiment to test whether an octopus could learn to guide a single arm along a mazelike path to a specific place to obtain food. The task was set up so that the arm's own chemical sensors would not suffice to guide it to the food; the arm would have to leave the water at one point to reach the target location. But the maze walls were transparent, so the target location could be seen. The octopus would have to guide an arm through the maze with its eyes.

***

"The octopus is sometimes said to be a good illustration of the importance of a theoretical movement in psychology known as embodied cognition.

"But the doctrines of the embodied cognition movement do not really fit well with the strangeness of the octopus's way of being. Defenders of embodied cognition often say that the body's shape and organization encode information. But that requires that there be a shape to the body. An octopus can stand tall on its arms, squeeze through a hole little bigger than one of its eyes, become a streamlined missile or fold itself to fit into a jar.

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"Further, in an octopus, it is not clear where the brain itself begins and ends. The octopus is suffused with nervousness; the body is not a separate thing that is controlled by the brain or nervous system."

Comment: A divergent strange branch of the evolutionary bush but part of the ocean's balance of nature.