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

by Sy Montgomery

The giant Pacific octopus is one of the fastest-growing animals on the planet. Hatching from an egg the size of a grain of rice, one can grow both longer and heavier than a man in three years.

to my surprise, her head is silky and softer than custard.

As I stroke her with my fingertips, her skin goes white beneath my touch. White is the color of a relaxed octopus; in cuttlefish, close relatives of octopus, females turn white when they encounter a fellow female, someone whom they need not fight or flee.

Female octopuses, like female humans, possess estrogen; she could be tasting and recognizing mine. Octopuses can taste with their entire bodies, but this sense is...

I ask Scott if I should try to detach from her grip and he gently pulls us apart, her suckers making popping sounds like small plungers as my skin is released.

gave rise to the myth of the kraken.

Only recently have many researchers accorded even chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of a mind.

“There’s always an effort to minimize emotion and intelligence in other species,”

an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it’s blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen.

In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings” but beings “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are, he writes, “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

She was leading me to a new way of thinking about thinking, of imagining what other minds might be like. And she was enticing me to explore, in a way I never had before, my own planet—a world of mostly water, which I hardly knew.

To borrow a phrase from songwriter John Denver, she filled up my senses.

Each arm seemed like a separate creature, with a mind of its own. In fact, this is almost literally true. Three fifths of octopuses’ neurons are not in the brain but in the arms. If an arm is severed from an octopus’s body, the arm will often carry on as if nothing has happened for several hours.

Another scientist calculated that to break the hold of the much smaller common octopus would demand a quarter ton of force. “Divers,” Wood said, “should be very careful.”

With Athena, I’ve had four of her arms on me, and you peel them off and then the other four arms are on.” “I think we’ve all been on dates like that,” I observed.

knew from living with two border collies and a 750-pound pet pig 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,

Another danger of boredom is that your octopus may try to go someplace more interesting. They are Houdini-like in their ability to escape their enclosures.

Hours later, it was found hiding in a teapot.

But Wilson was ahead of the curve. Long before the first octopus-enrichment handbook was published, many octopuses ago, he set out to create a safe toy worthy of an octopus’s intellect. Working at his lab at Arthur D. Little Corp., Wilson devised a series of three clear Plexiglas cubes with different locks. The smallest of the three has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse’s stall. You can put a live crab—a favorite food—inside and leave the lid unlocked. The octopus will lift the lid. When you lock the lid, invariably the octopus will figure out how to open it. Then it’s time to deploy the second cube. This one has a latch that slides counterclockwise to catch on a bracket. You put the crab in the first box and then lock it inside the second box. The octopus will figure it out. And finally, there’s a third cube. This one has two different latches: a bolt that slides into position to lock down, and a second one with a lever arm, sealing the lid much like an old-fashioned canning jar closes. Bill told me that once the octopus “gets it,” the animal can open all four locks in three or four minutes.

Bill told me that once the octopus “gets it,” the animal can open all four locks in three or four minutes.

Athena is, in the words of the late, great Canadian storyteller Farley Mowat, “more-than-human,” a being who doesn’t need us to bring her to completion.

Feelings of awe are known to expand the human experience of time availability.

“flow,” the state of being fully immersed in focus, involvement, and enjoyment.

Meditation and prayer, too, alter tim...

another way we alter our experience of time. We as well as other animals can mimic a...

involves mirror neurons—a type of brain cell that responds equally whether we’re watching another perform an action, or whether we...

I could stay here forever, filling my senses with Athena’s strangeness and beauty, talking with my new friends.

“Any hole, they’re going to go right through it,” Wilson agreed.

I do know the joys of gentle touch and of eating food when hungry. I know what it feels like to be happy. Athena was happy.

We had hardly known each other, but she had given me a glimpse into a kind of mind I had never known before. And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didn’t have a chance to grow.

At Scott’s invitation, I set out to cross a chasm of half a billion years of evolution. I set out to make an octopus my friend.

This was more than a trick. It was a complex task, because it involved more than responding to one request or command. It demanded that Myrtle make a decision.

anemones look like plants but are actually predatory invertebrate animals, like Octavia and starfish—but more closely related to corals and jellyfish.

here the octopus is separated by a pane of glass from the eels and rockfish so they don’t eat each other.

The only downside of his invention was that the exhibit used to have two electric eels, and the Worm Deployer caused them to fight. Now one of the eels has been exiled to a large tank near Scott’s desk.

There’s nothing as peculiar as an octopus.”

The ability of the octopuses and their kin to camouflage themselves is unmatched in both speed and diversity. Octopuses and their relatives put chameleons to shame. Most animals gifted with the ability to camouflage can assume only a tiny handful of fixed patterns. The cephalopods have a command of thirty to fifty different patterns per individual animal. They can change color, pattern, and texture in seven tenths of a second.

Acetylcholine helps with contraction of muscles; in humans, it is also important in memory, learning, and REM sleep.

It can create a light show on its skin.

Octavia’s camouflage abilities were superior to those of her predecessors because, living longer in the ocean among wild predators and prey, she had learned them.

For an invertebrate, the octopus brain is enormous.

Octavia’s was about the size of a walnut—the same size as that of an African gray parrot.

Another measure scientists use to assess brain power is to count neurons, the mainstay of the brain’s processing capabilities. By this measure, the octopus is again impressive. 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.

A human, on the other hand, has 100 billion neurons in the brain.

neuroscientist Cliff Ragsdale of the University of Chicago,

Ragsdale is investigating the neural circuitry of the octopus brain, to see if it works at all like ours.

And most of an octopus’s neurons aren’t even in the brain but are in the arms.

the octopus eye and our own are strikingly similar. Both have lens-based focusing, with transparent corneas, irises that regulate light, and retinas in the back of the eye to convert light to neural signals that can be processed in the brain.

The octopus’s wide-angle eyes are adapted to panoramic vision. And each eye can swivel independently, like a chameleon’s. Our visual acuity can extend beyond the horizon; an octopus can see only about eight feet away.

There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one—which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glittering rainbow of colors, technically color-blind.