Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagDominic Sivitilli

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An octopus holding a plastic bottle , generative ai

Will the Octopus Ever Find Its Way Into a Tidy Evolutionary Tree?

New finds in genetics and neuroscience both shed light and deepen the puzzle of the almost "alien" species

Just why the octopus — a short-lived, solitary, invertebrate exotherm — should seem as intelligent as a monkey has become quite the puzzle in recent years. Typical evolutionary explanations don’t really work. The octopus’s biological inheritance is precisely the type that we don’t associate with intelligence. For one thing, it is much more closely related to clams than to monkeys. What about the fact that the octopus has nine brains? Well, do nine invertebrate brains add up to more intelligence than one? That’s a question worth asking because it probably wouldn’t work with grasshoppers or worms. That is, both types of life form have brains but it isn’t clear how an installation of nine of them in a single individual Read More ›

an-octopus-holding-a-plastic-bottle-generative-ai-stockpack-adobe-stock
An octopus holding a plastic bottle , generative ai

Octopus Intelligence Is Unlike Anything We Know

Could such a different neurology really evolve purely by natural selection acting on random mutations?

The octopus, considered to be separated from us by about 700 million years of evolution, is believed to be the most intelligent invertebrate. It challenges many common assumptions about animal intelligence because it is also a short-lived loner. And we are discovering that its nervous system apparatus for intelligence is also completely different from typical mammal or bird models. Rather than having a centralized nervous system, the octopus’ nervous system is spread throughout its body. Two-thirds of its neurons are not inside its brain. Researchers aren’t even sure how this system can work, but it does … But it gets even more interesting. Many of these neurons can communicate with each other without going through the brain. Essentially, the nervous Read More ›