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

by Sy Montgomery

If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.

“You need to get within the mind of the toad,” he says. “We’re engaged in toad psy-ops.” How does a blind toad decide what is a safe, good place to stay—and how does he find it? “You get to learn very fast,” Scott says. “You learn to project empathy. Remember the movie E.T.? It’s kind of like that. You reach out with an invisible hand and read the organism. You have to meet them halfway. You have to be willing to listen.”

The hagfish would be in danger of suffocating on its own mucus, except it has learned, like a person with a cold, to blow it out its nose. But sometimes it produces too much slime for even a hagfish to tolerate, and for this occasion, it has devised a nifty trick: the animal wraps its tail around its body like a knot and slides the knot forward, clearing the slime.

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