As more and more research is conducted into the octopus, we are learning fascinating things about how the brain works and how life develops intelligence. As this article opens, “there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to be the closest things to aliens we have ever encountered: cephalopods.”
Cephalopods are the family of animals that include octopuses, squids and cuttlefish. For years, it has been known how intelligent octopuses are – for nothing else than how much they try to escape captivity. This article tells a number of these attempts, observed all across the world. Our favourite, an octopus, named Inky, managed to escape New Zealand’s National Aquarium by climbing through the tank’s overflow valve, scampering across eight feet of floor and sliding down a narrow drainpipe into the ocean.
Octopus brains are very different to humans and apes. And so as more and more of these behaviours are observed in octopuses, it is expanding how we think of intelligence and how it can emerge.
“All these behaviours—as well as many more observed in the wild—suggest that octopuses learn, remember, know, think, consider, and act based on their intelligence. This changes everything we think we know about “higher order” animals, because cephalopods, unlike apes, are very, very different to us.”
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