When Dominic Sivitilli began to study invertebrates, it didn’t take him long to pick a favorite. As he peered into the tanks of jellyfish, snails, crabs and their many spineless cousins, one organism seemed to be of a different class. “I got the feeling that one of them was studying me back,” he says.
Over the next few years he learned much about the octopus: that its entire body is involved in cognition, with its arms more or less independent of its brain; that it perceives the world in no small part through its suckers; and in fact its arms contain the majority of its neurons. These days he investigates the perplexing interaction between brain and arms. The exotic anatomy of the octopus, and the incredible implications for its subjective experience, raise questions that upend the standard notions of mind and consciousness.
But what first captivated Sivitilli — now a graduate student at the University of Washington — was the sense that when he looked at an octopus he was, in some profound way, face-to-face with an equal.
Octopus Traits
His fellow researchers know the feeling well. At first glance, this cephalopod, with its irregular, flowy movements and amorphous form, seems about as far from human as imaginable. Watch one for a moment, though, and beneath the enigmatic appearance, you might recognize something uncannily familiar.
