The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

by Sy Montgomery

“being a monster is not necessarily a bad thing.”

one function of dreams is to help an animal remember what it has learned.

An octopus has 300 million neurons. A rat, 200 million. A frog, perhaps 16 million. A pond snail, a fellow mollusk, at most, 11,000.

intelligence itself is most often associated with similarly social and long-lived creatures, like chimps, elephants, parrots, and whales.

Back past the Cenozoic, the time when our ancestors descended from the trees; back past the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs ruled the land; back past the Permian and the rise of the ancestors of the mammals; back, past the Carboniferous’s coal-forming swamp forests; back past the Devonian, when amphibians emerged from the water; back past the Silurian, when plants first took root on land—all the way to the Ordovician, to a time before the advent of wings or knees or lungs, before the fishes had bony jaws, before blood pumped from a multichambered heart.

purple sea urchins can live about thirty years; the feather duster worms survive a century; and the anemones, if unmolested by predators or stricken with disease, can theoretically live almost forever; scientists note that they do not appear to show signs of aging.

Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)

“I guess what I’ve discovered,” Anna said to me, “is what you do today doesn’t affect yesterday.”

The water in the bag gives off the scent of geraniums. Jellyfish also smell like geraniums when distressed, Jackie explains.