Speaking of Psychology - Inside the mind of an octopus, with Jennifer Mather, PhD

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Octopuses haven’t shared a common ancestor with humans in at least 600 million years. But somehow, separately, these invertebrates evolved remarkable problem-solving abilities, curiosity and intelligence. Octopus researcher Jennifer Mather, PhD, talks about what we know about octopus behavior and cognition, how they evolved to be so smart, how the octopus brain is structured, and what can we learn about thinking and intelligence in general from studying how it evolved in a species so far removed from us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. It's no surprise that we homo sapiens tend to have a human-centric view of intelligence. When we think of smart animals, we generally think of primates or other animals close to us on the evolutionary tree. But octopuses shake up this view of the world. They haven't shared a common ancestor with humans in at least 600 million years. But somehow, these invertebrates evolved remarkable problem-solving abilities, curiosity, and an intelligence all their own. So what do we know about how octopuses think and how they experience the world? How and why did they evolve to be so curious and smart? How are their brain structured?

And what can we learn about thinking and intelligence in general from studying how octopuses behave? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Mather, a professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and one of the world's leading experts on octopus behavior. Dr. Mather has spent decades studying cephalopods, marine animals that include octopuses, cuddlfish, and squids. Her fieldwork has taken her around the world to places including Bermuda, Hawaii, Bon Air, and the Pacific Island, Moria. She's authored dozens of academic papers and is co-author of the book Octopus, The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate. She was also the scientific advisor to the Netflix film My Octopus Teacher, which won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

And if you haven't watched it, you really should. Dr. Mather, thank you for joining me today. It's good to be here. And I mentioned in the introduction that octopuses are very far removed from us on the evolutionary tree. so far removed that some people compare meeting an octopus to meeting an alien life form. What do you think of that analogy? Oh, I'm not really happy about that. Let's say that life on this planet is very, very diverse.

So octopuses are completely not like us. On the other hand, honeybees are completely not like us, and they're not like octopuses either. So octopuses give us a glimpse into diversity. Why do you believe that octopus has evolved to be so intelligent? What were the evolutionary pressures at work? Probably the evolutionary pressures were the competition of the bony fishes. Because the bony fishes evolved about the time that the chileoids cephalopods evolved. And bony fishes really now dominate the ocean.

They're fast, they're smart, they're maneuverable. And to keep up with them, the cephalopods had to, evolve, if not necessarily to be fast, maybe to be smart. Do you have any salient examples of behavior that show how smart or curious octopuses are? I mean, what can they do that might surprise people? But one of the things that everybody quotes is what they call the coconut carrying octopuses in Australia. And a group of octopuses dug out, separated coconut halves from the muddy sand. and wandered off across in the open area, carrying them underneath them.

And after a while, when they got to the point that they wanted to stop and rest, they dropped the two halves, separate them, neatly line them up, crawl inside, pull it over between them, I guess you'd call it, and find themselves a perfect shelter. That's really interesting because that's something that has been called mental time travel, which is thinking about how the world is going to be in the future and making plans for what to do about it. That's pretty amazing, and that reminds me of a scene in my octopus teacher where the octopus that was basically the star of the show created a kind of armor using old shells and seafloor detritus, and it appeared to be very deliberate behavior to protect itself from a predator shark.

We often hear that there are very few animals that use tools like we humans do, but does this behavior and the coconut behavior indicate that octopuses are also using tools? Oh, absolutely. And one of the ways in which it's really clear is that they will hide in some kind of shelter. And of course, the shelters have different sizes of entrances as well as different spaces behind. And way back when I was studying octopuses in Bermuda, I was trying to figure out. how you could characterize their shelters. And one thing I noticed is the bigger the entrance, the more likely the octopus was to bring rocks and shells and pile them up in front of it to make the entrance smaller.

And there's tool use. But actually, my favorite tool use of theirs is they have a flexible siphon or funnel, which is really exhaloned as it would be if we blew our water. and they use this water jet for a whole bunch of things. They use it to clean out holes. They use it to repel nuisances, not really big predators, but nuisances, which includes, of course, my roping hand when I'm feeling around their home and trying to figure out what they've had for lunch yesterday.

So one of my favorite anecdotes, I really have to tell you this one, they have the giant Pacific octopus pre-will all the time at the Seattle Aquarium. And these animals are active at night, and they prefer that it's dark at night. And there was one situation where they had the night light on over top of the octopus tag. And the octopus simply reached up with its siphon, jetted a jet of water at the light, and shorted it out. What the heck? You have to wonder how it figured out that it. could do that. My guess is that they would have a general habit of jetting water nuisances

like pesky researchers and scavenging fish. And there are reports of octopuses in labs that have done things like squirted at researchers that maybe they didn't like for some reason. I mean, it was always the same person, right? When there's one octopus was doing that. Let me ask you, are we anthropomorphizing them or do they have distinct personalities? Well, there's two questions there. The first question is, can they tell individual humans apart? And with my colleague Roland Anderson at the Seattle Aquarium, we did conduct tests to see whether they could recognize individual humans.

And the answer was, yes, they can. And by the way, the two subjects, one of whom, of course, was Ron, dressed in the same Seattle Aquarium T-shirt. So that clue wasn't available to them. And we didn't actually figure out what clues were available, although there were different shapes and sizes. Still, that's pretty good. They can tell us apart.

Now, you've written that octopuses are tremendous explorers and that they really have an insatiable desire for moving around. I mean, they just don't stay in one place. Can you talk about that? What does that look like in the wilder, even in an aquarium? What happens to an octopus that is an explorer and is confined? Well, I'm really jealous, actually, of the octopus arms. because they've got eight of them, and they can explore separately with every one of them.

So actually, when they're hunting, they're not actually hunting by fission. They go to likely places, and then they stick their arms and crevices and snake them along cracks and explore the algae by sort of fueling up the stems and down the leaves. And so all the time, they're picking up information through their suckers. By the way, each sucker has hundreds of chemical and tactile. and each arm has hundreds of suckers. So they've got tons and tons of information. Speaking of information and how octopuses gather it, I mean, they're clearly using their arms for a lot of this work, but they do have brains. In fact, I understand they have more than one brain.

I mean, how is the octopus brain organized? No, no, it's a popular fallacy. They have one central brain. But what this comes from is the fact that only two-fifths of the nerves of the octopus are in the brain. Three-fifths are out there in the arms, and each arm, in fact, has a chain of ganglia down its dorsal surface. Each one of these ganglia is actually centered over one of the suckers. And though there's a sucker ganglion, this chain of ganglia is really, really responsible for making sure the suckers do what they're supposed to do and feel and smell what they're supposed to do, okay? But they're not a brain. One thing to call them is a plexus, and a plexus is a series of same units, which does have some organization, but it doesn't have a

central controller. Another way to look at it is what's going on, and the arms is subroutines. So the octopus brain doesn't tell the arms what to do in detail. Somebody described it as the octopus brain tells the ganglia what to tell the arms to do. There's an evolutionary reason for this, and I have to back up a little bit. Octopuses have no bones. And when you think about it, if you had no bones, how could you possibly move whole things, move parts of you around?

And the answer to that is specifically in the arms that the octopus stiffens some of the muscles to act as temporary skeletons. And then the other muscles articulate against those temporary skeletons. It's really way more flexibility than we have. But if you think about it, you couldn't possibly program all that in the brain. So what the brain does is it sends out general signals to the ganglia and the ganglia go, oh, okay, I'm supposed to do this.

So it's true that the arms have a lot of autonomy. There are octopuses, long-armed octopuses, that actually have autonomy that they can cast off an arm if they're threatened. And one of these cast-off arms will actually crawl down your hand, and the suckers will make contact with whatever is underneath them. There's a rumor. I've never seen this, but anyway, first of all, I should say that if an item out there in the environment is not terribly interesting and small, the octopus may reach out an arm, hold onto it with the suckers at the tip, and passes sucker by sucker by sucker by sucker up to the mouth to decide whether it's useful in hand or good to taste.

and I've done an ethogram, which is a description of all the behaviors of the octopuses. And in this particular case, I called this action conveyor belt. But the rumor is, and I haven't seen this, but the rumor is that an arm that has been cast off from the body can pick up a sucker and pass it from sucker to sucker to sucker towards the month that isn't there anymore. So that's a lot of organization, but it's not a brain because it's not a decision maker. And for me, subroutines is the best way to think about it. This isn't exactly a psychological question, but since you know so much about cephalopods, and I don't, how do octopuses camouflage themselves so well?

My understanding is that they have very limited color vision. So what does it work when they do this? Well, it's terribly ironic. They do not have color vision, and yet they can use color and camouflage. And exactly how they do it, we do not know. It's one of the big paradoxes of octopus behavior. But they have fabulous camouflage. And the reason they have such good camouflage is they have many organs in the skin, chromatophores.

Each of those chromatophores is an elastic sack containing pigments that are either yellow or red or brown black. And each of those elastic sacks has muscles pulling it out. So when the muscles relax, you can't see anything. You can see the reflective surfaces below. When they pull it out, suddenly you see the color. And the reason they're so good at this is, given that it's muscles, they could be very specific.

So there's really more to control to an area of it. a millimeter square, probably smaller, and they're very fast. So they can change color in about 33 milliseconds. And with that kind of combination, you could do anything you like. Now, there are some great videos out there that show Octopus is doing what looks like playing, whether they're batting a fish or doing the equivalent of bouncing a ball. Is that what they're doing? Is it your belief that they're actually playing?

Well, it was actually one of my research projects, again, with Roland Anderson, because we figured if any invertebrate plays, it would be the octopuses. And I had to call it Sergio Pellas, who is a specialist of a Malian play, who's written a couple of books on play. And I remember asking him one day whether he thought that octopuses would play. And he said, well, given what you told me about them, maybe. So Roland and I set up a situation, and we figured. for them to play, they'd have to be bored and safe and have something that was worth manipulating. This is one of my favorite studies of all times, by the way, for a very interesting reason. So we set up a situation where we had octopuses in the lab at the aquarium.

There was nothing in the lab except a place to hide and a floating pill bottle, which was, I guess it had about one quarter full of water, so it floated gently on the surface. and the first reaction of all the six octopuses we used was to just grab it, pull it into the mouth, feel around with the suckers, and figure out that it wasn't worth anything in terms of food and let it go. Two of the six, by about the fourth trial,

used, and this was actually serendipity, because we had the octopus at one end of the aquarium and the water intake for circulation at the other end. So two of the octopuses aimed a water jet and sent the pill bottle down to the intake where it came floating back to them. Now, if you do it once, you're not going to call that play. I think one of them was 16 times,

and one of them was 10 times. And that's play. Having contacts with the world of animal play has been some time talking to surgery and also to Gordon Berghardt, who has gave a book on play. and Gordon discusses this situation and says it passes all the rules for play. And the animals are doing this alone, right? I mean, you can't put two octopuses in the same tank.

Well, it depends on the species. But yes, there are some species where if you put two octopuses in the same tank, you'll end up with one welfare octopus. And that's a characteristic of the whole group, which means you really can never count on them being truly social, because they are all potentially at least cannibalistic. And that's why you're not going to see Octopus is doing social play because they don't like each other enough.

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on to. now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. You also teach a course in human-animal interaction. How did you get interested in that topic and how does it tie in with your research on cephalopods? Well, I'm in a psychology department and I teach psychology courses. So, of course, I have one foot. in the psychology kingdom. But on the other hand, I have a master's in biology.

And clearly a lot of understanding of biology as a general sweep. So in some ways, I found myself at the boundary. And one of the courses I taught for, I think, 25, 30 years was human perception. And I found it particularly useful to be able to teach human perception while having a knowledge of what I would call the sweep in the scope of perception across the animal kingdom because I didn't just see our sensory input as something that was special and different and only for us. I could compare it with other animal sensation.

So I remember how it started actually because I have been working on animal welfare because the invertebrates in general are not protected in research, even in the United States right now, they're not yet protected. And we had a department member who became ill, and the department chair came to me and said, do you think you can teach anything in animal behavior, some kind of seminar that has something to do with the welfare stuff? And I thought, oh, sure, because if you think about it,

we're in a world full of animals. And we don't really think about the interactions with them. And they're very, very important because we are now, as people keep saying, in the Anthropocene. Everything that we do is affecting every animal. So I designed, of course, that would help get at that. And my students enjoy it very much, actually, because it kind of opens their eyes to things that they haven't thought about that they are doing and seeing. But one of the things I had them do to begin with is talk about their individual philosophy with, regards to animals. And to begin with, I used the Western philosophers. And I thought, wait a minute,

wait a minute, we're not the only philosophy game in town. So I got a Plains Indian philosophy. And I got Buddhist philosophy. And then I said, the students, okay, here's some examples. Each of you should think about what yours is. But then I went over the different situations in which we do interact with animals and I said, okay, we're going to start at the closest possible. And every year I see my students saying, oh, dogs and cats. And I said, parasites. Think of leeches. Think of nets. And lately I detour to telling them about the human microbiome, which is very important in our psychological and physiological functioning. And yet we're only learning about it. It's amazing to think about it. A huge proportion of us is not us.

Or as I said to my students, you know, you see me walking across the classroom floor, but actually, I'm a community. I want to go back to something you said a minute ago about how octopuses are not protected in research. What do you mean by that? How are they not protected? How should they be protected? It is about to change. But presently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture rules say that you're could do anything to an inverteerate that you could do to dissected out piece of tissue, which is pretty horrible if you think of an octopus. Way back in the 1990s, I had a colleague who was on the Canadian Council of Animal Care, and she came down the hallway to meet one day and said,

do you think of your octopus as a tissue? And I said, no, of course not. But because she was a member of the CCAC, she set up a mini-committee. And in Canada, we were the first to say, some invertebrates, specifically cephalopods, are protected in research as same as vertebrates. When the European Union organized, they thought about this and discussed this and consulted with people like me who knew about these things and decided that this should be true in the EU. When the UK broke off from the EU in Brexit, they had for quite a while, a group called Custation.

compassion. And these people say, hey, we need to protect cephalopods, but we need to protect decopod crustaceans, shrimp, lobsters, crabs. And they did actually, they got a consultant Jonathan Birch from the London School of Economics. And he wrote a, you know, a major rapport, sent it to the House of Commerce and the House of Congress said, okay, so they're protected. In the United States, there is a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility in Harvard, and they had been agitating for quite a while, specifically to the NIH National Institute of Health, to institute some protection for cephalopods. Now, I guess it was about a year and a half ago.

They weren't getting anywhere with NIH, so they decided that they would hold a congressional brief. And they had met some members of Congress and members of the Senate send somebody to listen to the information. And I had the pleasure of making part in a congressional briefing, which is something I could never imagine that I would have done in my life by Zoom. But still, initially the NIH said, oh, well, we don't really know. We don't need to do this. But about three or four months ago, they decided that it probably would be used to. to have some guidelines. And they sent out to everyone their provisional guidelines.

And the physicians for social responsibility be looked at it and said, no, no, it's not good enough because you just say it's suggested. It should be actually a rule. And we're waiting to see what happens. I think in the end it will be required that cephalopods would be protected. I should say, by the way, that I've done research with colleagues in universities Southern California in New York, and most of the people who care about animal welfare in universities treat the cephalopause as honorary vertebrates.

But we have a long way to go. There's still most of the countries in the world that don't protect these animals at all. So just I'm wondering as a psychologist how you, you got so interested in cephalopods and octopuses in particular? But it was actually the other way around. I grew up beside the ocean and I got fascinated with intertidal animals. And I thought, okay, I'm going to study sea animals. And so I did my bachelors and masters in biology departments.

And my professor, when I was a Bill Herr kind of Florida State University, He said, you know, you should really go do your PhD with somebody who was working with Octopus behavior. And there weren't very many people doing Octopus behavior. There still aren't. Okay, there should be more. But I went to work with a professor who was in a psychology department. And he was what we sometimes call on the business, a toxic professor. And when he realized I was good, he didn't want to work with me anymore.

So I finished my PhD with another professor working with human. sensory motor coordination. And gradually, I drifted back to purely cephalopods, but I've got, as I said, one foot in each camp. Now, I mentioned in my introduction that you were an advisor to the Netflix documentary, my octopus teacher. How did that come about? And just as a follow-up for those of us who have seen it, did it do a good job of reflecting and capturing the range of octopus behavior that you've seen in your research? Well, Craig Foster, who's the producer of my octopus teacher have previously sent some footage to the BBC Blue Planet series. And the BBC Blue Planet series are very, very picky about making sure the biology is correct. I love them for

that. So they got in touch with me and said, hey, we want to know if this footage that we've got is accurate. Would you take a look at it? I said, sure, I worked with them for a while. And at the end of that time, the producers said, by the way, the filmmaker would kind of like to talk to you. He said, okay, if we give me your email, sure, her, no problem. And so that's how I found out that he was doing the film. And he said, you know, he wanted to be as picky about making sure the behavior was correct as the BBC people were. And that, once again, was fine with me. So they flew me to South Africa for 10 days so we could look over film footage and see that it was accurate.

And he's, in some ways, the way I am, he's actually a naturalist. I mean, he's a very good filmmaker, but he's very, very interested in the natural world belongs to an organization that's working on saving the oceans, and he's particularly interested in the kelp forests. So he was fun to work with, and in fact, I had my sabbatical last year for six months, and I went back to South Africa, visited with him, and also ended up directing a student in University of Cape Town. So it was a very nice association.

He is doing something that I think is quite surprising. And I'm very jealous, by the way. He lives just up the hill from his smuggling site. He goes swimming every day. And he's decided he wants to find 1,000 animal species in this kelm forest. Oh, I should say, by the way, that by his sort of dog watching what's going on, he has already discovered a few species. that are new to science.

Wow, that's great. And he works with a scientist at the University of Kingtown. Actually, his particular individual has 100 new species to his name. But I think Craig has discovered about four or five of them. So it's a wonderful association. Not too shabby. That's amazing. We should do an awful lot more of that, actually.

Citizen science is something that I firmly believe in. It belongs to them. It belongs to the people. Science is funded by the people, supported by those people. They have every right to know. And besides, it's fascinating. They should know. So I'm always happy to talk to anybody of all cephalots.

How is the study of octopuses translating into the study and the understanding of other animals? The simplest first step is to say that we always presumed that mammals, particularly primates, particularly homo sapiens, kind of had the corner on intelligence. And so the only model we have for evolution of intelligence was the higher mammals. But then you turn around and you say, wait a minute, there's another model. And when you say there's another model, you stop thinking that you know the way it happens. When you say there's two ways that you can talk about the evolution of intelligence, then you say, oh, okay.

Maybe artificial intelligence could use some different way. Maybe other animal species are evolving towards intelligence in a whole different group. Maybe there are different models. And one of the interesting models is the insects. Once again, totally different from us, but totally different from esophopods. And the social insects like the honeybees are very, very interesting. And Lars Chitka has a small. book about the honeybee intelligence.

Anybody who wants to look for a third route should be looking at insects. And there's another reason. Insects are 60% of the animals on the planet. And we have been ignoring them and killing them and demeaning them. And we need to study it. I was just last week reading a study about ants and how carpenter ants have figured out how to amput. legs of their colleagues in the colony, but only if the leg is injured in a certain place. If it's injured too far away from the body, there's no point in amputating, but if it's

close to the body, they can amputate it, and the ant will continue to live. It will survive. Interesting. So I'll give you an example of cross-group abilities. I used to think there are three species groups that garden. one of them of course is homo sapiens one of them is the leaf cutter ants that take pieces of leaf down into a refugium I guess and the fungus degrades the leaf and the ants use fungus as food but there's a third one there's a limpid if you think of the top hat shell that clings onto the rocks

There is a large lipet named Lottia, which is often called the owl lipid. And it turns out that the females guard a territory, scrape algae off the rocks. But they'll go to one place, and then the next day they'll go to another place, and in terms of that there are mucus trails that they make out of the way, fertilize the algae. And they actually knock invaders off the rocks. If they come along like a little sort of front-end loader, bam! and I love it. You're trying to picture a limpid doing that.

Yes, I've never seen a picture, but someone's got to. That's pretty amazing. But it's only the females. Oh. And they kick the males off if they don't want them for sex. But I was telling an insect specialist about this at the Animal Behavior Conference, and he said there's a kind of beetle that cultivates fungus. So I have to find out more about that.

That's four. It's still interesting to think about because gardens, of course, made a huge difference to our species. And we tend to think of that, I think, is one of the manifestations of intelligence, but we're not alone in doing it. Well, clearly you have a very inquisitive mind, so I'm wondering what's next for you? What else are you working on these days? Well, I have a book. It's nearly finished, and it's actually the marine ecosystems and how the marine ecosystems work. So there's three chapters looking at the things that are critical in the marine ecosystems. So one of them is movement. One of them is perception. And again, this is,

of course, where my background in perception comes in handy. And one of them is buoyancy. So I'll give you an example from the buoyancy chapter, the magic number 1.025. What do you think that might be? I don't know. The density of water. I don't know. Very good. Did I get it? the density of distilled water is 1.000-0-0.025 is the density of salt water. Good for you. I was a bio-major. So why is that critical? Because you float in salt water. Right. So if you float in salt water, you're fine. But if you don't, you sink.

And the sunshine is up there. The plankton are up there. So somehow, or other pretty well every marine animal has to deal with, what do you do about your buoyancy? Some of them have fluids with air. Some of them have ammonia in their tissues. Some of them just keep moving. Tuna just keep moving. But life in the open ocean is about figuring out how not to sink. Well, I look forward to seeing your book.

so keep us posted here on Speaking of Psychology. We'll talk again. I want to thank you very much for joining me, Dr. Mather. This has been really interesting. It's been fun. Thanks for having me. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. www.spinkingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman.

Thank you for listening, the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.