The Soul of an Octopus

7 annotations • Jul 2023 – Aug 2023 • data

But what I did know intrigued me. Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart. This bore out what scant experience I had already had; like many who visit octopuses in public aquariums, I've often had the feeling that the octopus I was watching was watching me back, with an interest as keen as my own.
If you took the monsters' point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.
A lion is a mammal like us; 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.

Humans have always exalted dreams. Pindar of Thebes, the Greek lyric poet, suggested that the soul is more active while dreaming than while awake. He believed that during a dream, the awakened soul may see the future, "an award of joy or sorrow drawing near." So it's no wonder that humans were quick to reserve dreams for people alone; researchers for many years claimed dreams were a property of "higher" minds.
The study was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. "It fit all the criteria for play behavior," Roland told me. "Only intelligent animals play," he stressed. "Birds like crows and parrots; primates like monkeys and chimps; dogs and humans."
They also told us about Paul, the octopus from Sea Life Oberhausen, in Germany, who correctly predicted the outcomes of the 2010 FIFA World Cup soccer matches seven times in a row. Before a match, Paul would be offered two boxes, each containing a mussel. Each was adorned with a different flag representing the two nations whose teams would face one another in the upcoming game. How did Paul make his selection? And how did he do so with such success? We considered the possibilities—including that the octopus was drawn to the aesthetic qualities of one flag over the other, and that he really did know which team would win.

Scott had announced to me with concern, "I smell fish stress." The scent is subtle—I cannot smell it at all—but the low-tide odor Scott detects, he explained at the time, is that of heat-shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both plants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses as well.