Steve Watson

What does an octopus think with?

This drawing of the octopus’s brain – or the part of it that isn’t contained in the arms themselves – is from Mike Lisieski’s Cephalove site. The octopus is a creature I often use as an example of something that is apparently quite intelligent and yet very different from ourselves. It’s a good way to get people to question their chauvinistic assumptions (about C-fibres for example, or about the kinds of behaviours that can be interpreted with intelligence epithets) without appealing to Mad Martians. The brain clearly has a completely different structure from the human brain – or even from the brains of those mammals to whom we’re more accustomed to attributing intelligence, such as cats and dogs, chimps and dolphins. Those two large masses to the sides for example, are the optic lobes and are located below the eyes. Their functions seem relatively obvious, and some of the other functional areas have also been identified, but little enough study seems to have been done on the details of the functional divisions. It makes you wonder where the thinking is actually done here. Where is the analogue to the cortex, for example?

The book referenced is J. Z. Young’s “The Anatomy of the Nervous System of Octopus Vulgaris” (1971)