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

by Sy Montgomery

that to allow a smart animal to become bored is to court disaster. They will invariably come up with something creative to do with their time that you don’t want them to do,

Dog training in a nutshell.

In our dreams, we humans experience our most isolated and mysterious existence: “All men,” wrote Plutarch, “while they are awake, are in one common world; but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.” How much more inaccessible, then, are the dreams of animals?

“Just about every animal,” Scott says—not just mammals and birds—“can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.” Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an anaconda, together, you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle.

“The people here are as different from regular people as an octopus. I feel at home here,” Anna says, speaking for all of us, “like I belong.”

In fact, octopuses have a hormone so like oxytocin that scientists named it cephalotocin.

I’ve learned,” she said, expressing a wisdom way beyond her years, “that happiness and sadness are not mutually exclusive.”

Their flights were not random. Instead, they matched a mathematical algorithm for a pattern called the Lévy distribution. This search pattern is an effective way to find food, a method also known to be used by albatrosses, monkeys, and deer, and the flies made reasonable, not random, choices, too. Scientists have found similar patterns in human behavior, in the flow of e-mails, letters, and money (and, Brembs observed, in the paintings of Jackson Pollock).

Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Signed by scientists including physicist Stephen Hawking in front of 60 Minutes cameras, it asserts that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness” and that “nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses [italics added], also possess these neurological substrates.” No one knows octopuses like Jennifer does. If she says we’ll find octopuses,

We seek to fathom the soul.

One calls soul “the indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go, that watches the world pass.”

to Hawaii, where ancient myths tell us our current universe is really the remnant of a more ancient one—the only survivor of which is the octopus, who managed to slip between the narrow crack between worlds.