The Mind of an Octopus

A fascinating article about octopuses*.

From Orion Magazine...

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, of the City University of New York. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

And then there's this...

[R]esearchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.

*More from Orion: Octopuses, not octopi, is now considered the correct plural among the octopus intelligentsia. Octopi has been discarded as the plural because of its Latin ending on a Greek word.

Who knew.