Short Wave - What Octopus Minds May Tell Us About Aliens

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Octopuses! They are escape artists, they camouflage in all kinds of surroundings, and they are incredibly intelligent creatures--and that intelligence evolved completely separately from humans'. That separate evolution makes them the perfect animal to study for Dominic Sivitilli, a PhD candidate in astrobiology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Washington.Short Wave co-host Aaron Scott and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) camera person Stephani Gordon visited Dominic's lab to learn about octopus intelligence, and how their arms and suckers can basically think for themselves. Aaron talks to co-host Emily Kwong about how studying octopuses can provide insight into how aliens might think. To see the octopuses in action, watch the video story Aaron and Stephani produced for OPB's nature show Oregon Field Guide here: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/03/29/want-to-study-how-aliens-might-think-look-to-the-octopus/Is there another sea creature you want to learn more about? E-mail the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everyone. This is Emily Kwong, Shortwave co-host. Oh, that's me. And Aaron Scott. And Aaron Scott, also Shortwave co-host. Appearing in our very first episode together, as you can tell. We're new to this. We're doing great. Doing great, doing great. I'm so excited to be here with you, Emily. I'm so excited that I forgot where I am.

I'm so excited to make some shortwave magic with you in our sandbox of mayhem. What are we doing today? Yeah. So today we are going to spend a little bit of time with an astrobiologist. Perfect. So astrobiology is all about exploring what life might look like on other planets, how we might find it. But pop quiz, Emily, what if you wanted to study other forms of intelligence, but you know you didn't have a rocket ship to shoot to the next solar system, where would you look?

You'd look in the diaries of aliens. Oh, Emily, that's so human-centric. I mean, what if they didn't write? What if they don't have emotions? What if they experience the day different than us? Well, for one scientist, Dominic Civitilli, the answer is under the sea. It feels like being on some alien planet, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where you're just floating among this this green haze and with how dark it is and with how cold it is and then surrounded

by this incredible diversity of invertebrates and other life forms down there it definitely it definitely does feel like i mean i'm on like a completely different planet or like almost in a completely different dimension i get what dominic is saying i've done some snorkeling in the pacific northwest and it is otherworldly what is dominic doing down there what's he looking for So he's looking for something that has actually really evolved not to be found. It has one of the best camouflage systems in the entire world. You do see them bob their head up and down, so you can kind of see like a piece of kelp or rock playing peekaboo. Camouflage is a good clue.

Are we talking about octopuses? Bingo, you got it. So it's not just how cool they look that makes them interesting to Dominic as an astrobiologist. It's actually the fact that they branched away from humans. on the evolutionary tree some 500 million or so years ago. So our last common ancestor was some sort of flatworm, which means that octopuses developed their intelligence completely separately than we developed ours.

The octopus's long separate evolution toward cognitive complexity makes them a very appropriate model for what intelligence might look like if it evolves on a completely different planet. Forget a central brain, Emily. Imagine what it would be like to have your your hands and your feet think for themselves. So today on the show, we wrap our central brain around an octopus's decentralized one to consider intelligent minds very different from our own. I'm Emily Kwong.

And I'm Aaron Scott, and you, dear listener, are listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Cephala podcast from NPR. You're such a nerd. Okay, Aaron, many a tale has been written about how, ridiculously intelligent octopuses are, right? Yes. There's whole Reddit channels devoted to people swapping octopus stories. I'm going to tell you one.

My favorite thing about them is how they're escape artists. So the aquarium near where I grew up as a kid, they had this problem of fish disappearing from their tanks in the night. And after a few days of this, through like nighttime vision hallway cameras, the staff figured out it was the, the octopus sneaking out of its tank for a snack and then sneaking back in before the lights were turned on.

That sounds like an episode of Octopus CSI. I love it. Seriously. So this story begins last summer when camera person extraordinaire Stephanie Gordon and I headed up to meet Dominic at Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island. It was for a story we were doing for my last job, Oregon Field Guide. Awesome. I am sensing a field trip.

Set the scene, my friend. Dominic's building is on the edge of this beautiful harbor. He's set up in a room that has tanks running all along the walls, and there are pipes that pump seawater through them, and then each of the octopuses has its own tank, full of rocks and shells and toys like floating plastic dinosaurs. Plus, to your point, full-on security measures. When I put the cover on, there's a few things that I need to make sure of.

So water running, there's an octopus in there. cover on, fully on, and then bricks. So the bricks might be overkill, but I sleep better. So when we arrive, he actually removes the bricks from one of those tanks and takes the lid off. And it's this magical moment where he places his fingers on the surface of the water. And then this small octopus kind of rises out of the corner. and stretches out her arms to actually touch his fingertips. This is Lisbon.

She is our giant Pacific octopus. She can grow to being well over 20 feet long if she spread her arms out. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's right now she's not anywhere close to that. She's just like a foot across. But it was so cool to watch as her suckers kind of work their way across his fingertips.

Our fingertip might have. 400 mechanical receptors. A given sucker might have tens of thousands of mechanical and chemical receptors on it. So each sucker is, like, many times more mechanically sensitive than one of our fingertips is and also has the benefit of being able to taste and smell the world around it. And it's able to do this because each sucker has a local computation center where most of this information is being processed. A computation center?

What does that mean? Yeah, so you can think about it like her suckers can feel, they can taste, they can smell, and he says each sucker basically has like a little mini brain of its own. Each individual sucker on the arm of the octopus processes the information on its own. Basically, yes. And each of those little processing centers link together to create these thick bands of neurons that run the entire lengths of the octopus's arms. You know, we humans are so brain-centric.

Everything we perceive and process about the world is routed through this central command center in our craniums, but not so the octopus. It's really hard to imagine how these animals are experiencing the world. Their nervous system and their perceptions and sensory systems are built entirely differently from ours. While most of our neurons are in our brain, most of their neurons exist beyond their central brain in their arms. and suckers. Dominic calls it distributed intelligence. Distributed intelligence sounds like it radiates kind of throughout their body.

So if the suckers and arms are thinking for themselves, how does that explain octopus behavior? Yeah, that's exactly what Dominic is trying to figure out. He created this puzzle box that has rows of crevices and he puts some shrimp into one of those

crevices and then sets the box on the wall of the tank so that we can see into it, but all Lisbeth can see is a black box with a couple of holes in it. So she crawls under the box, and she starts running her arms into the holes. Come on, you can do it. Her suckers are exploring each crevice, probing for a snack. And then finally, one sucker finds the shrimp,

and all of its neighboring suckers wrap around the shrimp bit, and then pull it up to her mouth. She got it. She got it? Yeah. Good girl. The octopus is mine at work. There seems to be a strategy that the sucker is used to coordinate.

And this strategy seems to rely on a recruitment mechanism. So if one sucker finds something of interest, so say if it's like a clam or a muscle or some kind of prey, then it will tell the next sucker over, hey, I found something of interest. And that sucker will turn toward that prey. Oh. So neurologically, there's almost like a sucker chain reaction happening in these arms. Yeah, exactly. That's a great way to think about it. I mean, he's analyzed hours of footage of different octopuses all doing this test. And what it looks like is that the more suckers get involved, the stronger is signaled they all send to the brain. Think of it kind of like upvoting something on Reddit. I'm really curious then, Aaron, about how such a complex system even evolved. Like, what is the benefit of having intelligence spread throughout the octopus body instead of a central? place like it is for us with our brains.

In Dominic's eye, it has a little bit to do with the fact that, you know, we simple vertebrates with our skeletons, we can only move our arms and our fingers and our legs so many ways. But an octopus can bend its eight arms with just almost infinite freedom, twisting and winding. And then you add all that sensory information that each sucker is receiving. and you think about the fact that they hunt in the dark so they're not even able to see things. So it's like they're really being guided by each sucker as they explore these rock walls or coral reefs. And you can see there is a lot of information to process all at once. What the brain will do is send out a very generalized command to multiple arms at once

and let the arms kind of figure it out from there. And the suckers with all their chemoreceptors, all their mechanical receptors, are very well equipped to then find, interesting objects out there in the world. Yeah, it sounds like a huge evolutionary advantage, in fact. It does. Just being able to explore your world with so much finesse. Yeah, and then only like get the information you really need making it to the central brain.

I mean, you might think about it a little bit like a web search. Like our computer does all this processing in the background and all we get back are the search results. And it seems like in the lab, Dominic himself is one of the most interesting things for them to find. If they see me around the lap, they will approach, go to the edge of their tank and just watch the interesting things that are happening. Here I am studying them, and yet they seem to also somehow be studying me in their own way. You mentioned Dominic as an astrobiologist. How does this research about octopus's influence his field? Like,

how is their world in the ocean connected to other planets, which are so far away? Yeah, yeah. So he says that for the most part, astrobiologists tend to focus on single-celled life, things like bacteria, because they think that it's more likely to evolve on nearby planets and moons than intelligent multicellular life, like octopuses. That said, Dominic does point to some of Jupiter's icy moons that are thought to have oceans underneath that ice, and if, say, they had hydrothermal vents,

theoretically, they could support complex life. So hypothetically speaking, there could be an octopus-esque creature on Europa? I mean, I don't know that Dominic would stake his scientific career on arguing for like Cthulhu like octopus aliens out there in our solar system. Yeah. Although that would certainly be really cool. It's really more about broadening our understanding of what intelligence is beyond just our human-centered idea. In my time studying the octopus, I really learned to appreciate that there are many varieties of intelligence out in the world and possibly the universe. The human mind is just one of many different varieties.

It's not about how intelligent they are. It's about how they are intelligent. I love this point so much, Aaron, because it's such a part of science to help us understand. stand things on its terms, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And I really think that's the point that Dominic is trying to make with this research. Aaron, you know, you also produced a video story about octopuses for Oregon Field Guide, right? Yes.

So Stephanie Gordon did a beautiful job filming all the octopuses in Dominic's lab. And we got cool underwater footage of him releasing all those octopuses back into the ocean at the end of the summer. You can find a link to it in our episode notes. Today's episode was produced by Eva Tesfi, edited by Giselle Grayson, who is our senior supervising editor and fact-checked by Catherine Seifer. The audio engineer for this episode was Margaret Luth. Neil Carruth is our senior director of On-demand news programming and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. I'm Emily Kwong.

Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from MPR.