Speaker 1: Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot. Hey, Welcome to Science Stuff, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. I'm Hoorheit cham and today we're asking the
Speaker 1: question how smart is an octopus? We've all seen the
Speaker 1: videos online of octopuses appearing to do amazing things and
Speaker 1: be curious and clever, but it is there real intelligence
Speaker 1: behind those eight arms. We're going to talk to three
Speaker 1: octopus experts, including an animal psychologist, a National Geographic underwater explorer,
Speaker 1: and a neurobiologist. We're going to talk about how octopuses
Speaker 1: evolved but their brain is like what they can do.
Speaker 1: And then at the end we're going to tackle the
Speaker 1: big mystery about why octopuses even exist. So come be
Speaker 1: under the sea in an Octopus's science garden as we
Speaker 1: answer the question how smart is an octopus?
Speaker 2: Hey?
Speaker 1: Everyone, Today we're talking to three experts. First is a
Speaker 1: scientist who's been studying octopuses for fifty years, Professor Jennifer Mather.
Speaker 3: I'm recently retired professor in the Department of Psychology, University
Speaker 3: of Lethbridge.
Speaker 1: What is your background studying octopuses.
Speaker 3: Well fifty years. As a kid, I grew up at
Speaker 3: the edge of the ocean and taught the animals were
Speaker 3: wonderful and fascinating and decided I was going to study
Speaker 3: them when I grew up.
Speaker 1: What made you so obsessed with octopuses?
Speaker 3: They're fascinating and wonderful. I love watching the weaving move
Speaker 3: and I love watching the patterns that they show on
Speaker 3: their skin, and I love trying to figure out what
Speaker 3: they're doing with all those.
Speaker 1: Arms because it's so different from us.
Speaker 3: Yes, they're not aliens, they're just different.
Speaker 1: The second expert is doctor Alex Schnell, the National Geographic Explorer.
Speaker 2: I am a comparative animal psychologist, and that is just
Speaker 2: a fancy word for saying I study animal minds, and
Speaker 2: the particular group of animals that I mainly study are
Speaker 2: the cephalopods, which include octopus, cuttlefish, and squid. I'm interested
Speaker 2: in their capacity to learn and their capacity to remember,
Speaker 2: and so I get inspired by some of the studies
Speaker 2: that have been conducted in humans and children and adults,
Speaker 2: as well as other vertebrate animals, and I try and
Speaker 2: adapt those and see if cuttlefish and octopuses can solve them.
Speaker 1: You sort of run the same tests that people have
Speaker 1: done on those animals, on cuttlefish and octopuses. Yeah, and finally,
Speaker 1: our last expert is doctor Tamar Gudnik.
Speaker 4: I am a researcher no esologists studying sophalo pods of
Speaker 4: various types for the past almost twenty years now. Then
Speaker 4: my main research animal has been octopus.
Speaker 1: Amazing. What does neuroethnologist mean?
Speaker 4: It is the connection between study of behavior and neuroscience,
Speaker 4: So how the brain creates behavior?
Speaker 1: All right? The first thing I wanted to ask our
Speaker 1: experts was how did octopuses evolve? I mean, they're so
Speaker 1: different from us. Where did they come from?
Speaker 2: So? Cephalopods appeared over five hundred million years ago, and
Speaker 2: originally their ancestors had shells like the nautilus'es, and then
Speaker 2: many of the lineages moved into deep water where they
Speaker 2: gradually lost their shells. Really that meant that they tradeed
Speaker 2: defense for mobility and flexibility because they're able to be
Speaker 2: a bit more agile.
Speaker 1: Now, okay, So cephalopods, which include octopuses, cuttlefish, and squids,
Speaker 1: branched the evolutionary tree of life about five hundred million
Speaker 1: years ago. This was a long time ago, and they
Speaker 1: started off as squishy animals with shells, kind of like
Speaker 1: the nautilus that then ventured out to the deep sea
Speaker 1: where they lost their shell. Why did they lose their shell?
Speaker 1: Why weren't shells useful down there?
Speaker 2: Well, we think that potentially in the darkness, you might
Speaker 2: not need a shell to protect yourself, and so it
Speaker 2: really was a trade off. Now they're completely soft bodied,
Speaker 2: but now they've got more mobility and more flexibility to
Speaker 2: move around, I.
Speaker 1: See, and you don't have to carry around a giant.
Speaker 2: Shell totally no baggage.
Speaker 1: All right. So in the deep, dark, open ocean, there
Speaker 1: weren't as many animals trying to eat them, so they
Speaker 1: devolved their shell. But then eventually some of these squishy
Speaker 1: pre octopuses moved back to shallow waters. There things got dangerous,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: We see think that they probably faced intense predator pressures
Speaker 2: compared to many other animals because they have no teeth,
Speaker 2: no claws, no antlers, no shell, nothing to protect themselves,
Speaker 2: and so they really had to use their ability to
Speaker 2: blend in like their camouflage or their brains to kind
Speaker 2: of one up all the things in the ocean that
Speaker 2: might want to eat them.
Speaker 1: Interesting, there were boneless filets. Basically, yes, exactly skinless boneless
Speaker 1: was it perfect snack?
Speaker 4: And the idea is that they evolved in a sort
Speaker 4: of an arrange race with bony fish. There were prey
Speaker 4: and predator for each other. And with the speed and
Speaker 4: a predatory lifestyle, there was also an increase in intelligence
Speaker 4: or cognitive ability.
Speaker 1: And so the pressure was on them to be smarter
Speaker 1: in this environment of competition.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, the more you move, the more of
Speaker 4: nervous system you need.
Speaker 1: So the history of octopuses is that they were not
Speaker 1: lost their shells, but when they came back to shallower waters,
Speaker 1: suddenly they were very exposed. And so to survive they
Speaker 1: had to get smarter, and that meant upgrading their brains.
Speaker 1: So the next thing I asked their experts to do
Speaker 1: was to describe and octopus's brain. What can you tell
Speaker 1: us about the neurology of octopuses.
Speaker 3: By the definition we use for brain size, which is
Speaker 3: brain body ratio, they have a fairly big brain, bigger
Speaker 3: than a pigeon, bigger than a laborate.
Speaker 1: I see, yes, relative to their size, octopuses are as
Speaker 1: the kids say, big brain and This is interesting. That
Speaker 1: brain is in the shape of a donut.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, cephalopods have really unusual and highly specialized brains.
Speaker 2: So their central brain forms like a donut shape that
Speaker 2: wraps around their throat. And so they're esophagus what so
Speaker 2: all the food that they ate passes through their brain.
Speaker 1: What do they have a donut brain?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
Speaker 4: It also has a limiting size in terms of what
Speaker 4: you can eat because the esophagus goes through the brain.
Speaker 1: It limits the size of things they can eat because
Speaker 1: it has to pass through the brain. So they really
Speaker 1: think through their food literally. Yeah. The other unique thing
Speaker 1: about octopuses is that they have a lot of neurons
Speaker 1: and most of those neurons are not in their central brain.
Speaker 1: How many neurons or green cells do octopuses have?
Speaker 4: So there are two things. One is how many nerve
Speaker 4: cells do they have? That is around five hundred mealsman,
Speaker 4: But about more than half of that is actually outside
Speaker 4: the brain, so it's outside the central nervous system.
Speaker 3: But the interesting thing about it is three fifths of
Speaker 3: their neurons are not in that brain. They are out
Speaker 3: in the arms. Each arm has a dorsal nerve cord
Speaker 3: which is actually a chain of ganglia all the way
Speaker 3: down they are.
Speaker 1: Yes, more than half of an octopus's neurons are in
Speaker 1: their arms nerve structures called ganglia, So their arms are
Speaker 1: sort of independent, each process what they feel, its sense,
Speaker 1: and a lot of how each arm moves. But as
Speaker 1: our experts say, that does not mean they have nine brains.
Speaker 2: Now. It doesn't mean that they have eight mini brains,
Speaker 2: as some media reports suggests, because complex decision making still
Speaker 2: requires communication between the arm clusters and the central brain.
Speaker 1: So it's not like each arm thinks for itself. But
Speaker 1: their whole nervous system is definitely different than ours. It's
Speaker 1: more spread out, And this is interesting because it's another
Speaker 1: way of putting together a brain.
Speaker 2: What I find so fascinating is despite having such different
Speaker 2: neuro architecture, pods are still capable of intelligent traits and
Speaker 2: the glimmers of intelligence that we're seeing in humans, chimpanzees, cars, dolphins.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they diverged five hundred million years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're seeing traits that are really familiar to us
Speaker 2: when we think about intelligence.
Speaker 1: All Right, when we come back, we'll talk about what
Speaker 1: those traits are meaning, what can octopuses actually do. How
Speaker 1: smart are they exactly? And then later we'll tackle a
Speaker 1: big mystery about octopuses that has puzzled scientists for decades.
Speaker 1: To stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back.
Speaker 1: We're talking about how smart octopus is sin thephalopods in
Speaker 1: general are. And so far we've learned how octopuses evolved
Speaker 1: and how that pushed their brain to be smarter. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing about octopuses. They're on a completely different
Speaker 1: branch of the evolutionary tree of life. Their branch split
Speaker 1: away from ours back when we were just a flatworm
Speaker 1: with fuzzy eyes. So they built their brain and nervous
Speaker 1: system in a totally different way. Did I mention? Their
Speaker 1: brain is in the shape of a donut. And the
Speaker 1: other thing about octopuses is that more than half of
Speaker 1: their nervous system is in their eight arms. Here's our
Speaker 1: doctor Tamar Gudnig described it. Here.
Speaker 4: We're talking in about an animal with a nervous system
Speaker 4: out of a completely different evolutionary life. This brain is
Speaker 4: just in no way related to what our brain looks like,
Speaker 4: what a mouse's brain looks like, what a lizard brain
Speaker 4: looks like, it's just completely different in terms of how
Speaker 4: it's organized. You have about three hundred million neurons in
Speaker 4: the octopus that are outside the central nervousness. So if
Speaker 4: you look at an octopus arm, octopus arms have hundreds
Speaker 4: of suckers. Each one of these suckers has tens of
Speaker 4: thousands of sensory cells, so you have taste receptors, chemical receptors,
Speaker 4: touch receptors, and even photoreceptors. Then you have skin that
Speaker 4: the entire coloration system is based on neural activity. So
Speaker 4: every time an octopus flashes color, it's all nerve control,
Speaker 4: opening and closing little sacks of pigment.
Speaker 1: They have photoreceptors in their suckers, so they can see
Speaker 1: with their tentacles.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean they don't have lenses. I think, so
Speaker 4: an octopus arm will respond to a change in lighting
Speaker 4: without the animal itself being able to see the change
Speaker 4: in lighting.
Speaker 1: So their whole nervous system is more spread out in
Speaker 1: some way. They sort of think with their whole body,
Speaker 1: not just their brain and stomach like some of us. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what can this totally different, almost alien nervous system
Speaker 1: of the octopus do? How smart is it? I asked
Speaker 1: each of our experts to tell us what octopuses are
Speaker 1: known to be able to do, and the first thing
Speaker 1: they pointed out was that they're really good at navigating.
Speaker 1: What do we know about octopuses and cuttlefish also in
Speaker 1: terms of their chronic to skills and abilities.
Speaker 2: So in terms of their cognition, I mean, we know
Speaker 2: that they demonstrate really advance learning and memory, and they
Speaker 2: have exceptional spatial navigation abilities.
Speaker 3: And remember where they were. They can remember how to
Speaker 3: get back home, for instance, and then just imagine that
Speaker 3: they're going out hunting, so they can go out, hunt,
Speaker 3: come back, and then the next day they can say, okay,
Speaker 3: I went out that way yesterday, there's not going to
Speaker 3: be any food there. I should go out in another direction.
Speaker 3: So they're not just remembering where everything is, they're also
Speaker 3: remembering where they have been.
Speaker 1: And this, the experts say, demonstrates a very important sign
Speaker 1: of intelligence called episodic memory, which means you can remember what, when,
Speaker 1: and where something happened. For example, octopuses and cuttlefish can
Speaker 1: remember what they ate, where they ate it, and when.
Speaker 1: If you set an experiment where say you vary the
Speaker 1: kinds of food you put at different times in different
Speaker 1: boxes around where they live. In other words, they can
Speaker 1: remember personal experiences. Now, the other big sign of how
Speaker 1: smart octopuses are is that some of them use tools.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the footpods in general expert problem solvers, and some
Speaker 2: octopuses can even use tools. So the coconut octopus transports
Speaker 2: coconuts and other objects as portable shelter, and so it
Speaker 2: lives in a very barren type of habitat in Indonesia
Speaker 2: called Limbay Strait, where it's just black volcanic sand. There's
Speaker 2: not many places to hide. So they will collect a
Speaker 2: particular coconut half or a scallop half, and they will
Speaker 2: scour the ocean floor to find kind of the perfect
Speaker 2: seal so that when a predator lack a barracouter swims by,
Speaker 2: they can bury half into the sand and seal that
Speaker 2: shell all that coconut.
Speaker 1: Oh, they get inside, and then they pull the two
Speaker 1: house together. Whoa, they created their own little house. They're
Speaker 1: basically building a house their own arvy. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: tool use. You would count that as tool use.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's tool use because they're using an external object
Speaker 2: for a very directed goal and they're manipulating that object.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you search for coconut octopus, you see videos
Speaker 1: of this octopus carrying around coconut shells and then hiding
Speaker 1: in them if they're in danger. Another example of how
Speaker 1: smart they are is that octopuses have been seen to play.
Speaker 3: They play interestingly enough.
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
Speaker 3: We set up this experiment out of the aquarium, So
Speaker 3: we had an octopus in a tank that had practically
Speaker 3: nothing in it. So we gave the octopus a floating
Speaker 3: pill bottle and it floated up above the animal and
Speaker 3: the water pushed it towards it, and the octopus aimed
Speaker 3: a jet of water and set it to the far end,
Speaker 3: and it came back wow, And the animal was doing
Speaker 3: the equivalent of boutsing the ball. There were two individuals
Speaker 3: who did this in one I think was eight times
Speaker 3: and another one was twelve times.
Speaker 4: Basically, the idea of play is that you have an
Speaker 4: object that there is no purpose in it interacting with it.
Speaker 4: There's no food involved, there's no reward involved. It's not
Speaker 4: going to give you anything, and still they keep taking
Speaker 4: the object, taking it close, throwing away, keep doing it,
Speaker 4: throwing it away, and so that is quanta viable of
Speaker 4: saying there is a form of play there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, octopuses like to play. And there are lots of
Speaker 1: other examples of observations of octopuses seeming to solve problems
Speaker 1: and show flexible thinking. But one of the problems is
Speaker 1: that a lot of these observations are anecdotal, meaning that
Speaker 1: people have reported seeing octopuses do these things, but very
Speaker 1: few of them have been tested in a scientific experiment.
Speaker 1: And that's because octopuses are known to be terrible experimental animals.
Speaker 1: They're known to be moody, temperamental. Some even hold grudges
Speaker 1: against specific scientists and will squirt them with water whenever
Speaker 1: the scientist walks into the room. They're also incredible escape artists,
Speaker 1: so it's hard to even keep them in an experiment.
Speaker 1: It's like they're too smart to get them to do
Speaker 1: what you want them to do for an experiment, but
Speaker 1: they're not smart enough that you can communicate or reason
Speaker 1: with them. So instead scientists study cuddlefish another cephalopot and
Speaker 1: here doctor Chanel did an experiment that show another big
Speaker 1: sign of how smart these animals are. Can you describe
Speaker 1: that experiment for us that you.
Speaker 2: Did so in humans, what the experiments would do is
Speaker 2: they would tell the child, here's a marshmallow. You can
Speaker 2: eat this marshmallow straight away, but if you wait fifteen minutes,
Speaker 2: you can have a second marshmallow. And then they'd leave
Speaker 2: the room and they'd see what the children would do.
Speaker 2: And this is a really difficult task. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: very tempting, especially if you like marshmallows.
Speaker 1: It would be tough for me for sure.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: This is famously called the Stanford marshmallow experiment, named after
Speaker 1: an experiment done in the nineteen sixties by psychologist Walter Mitchel
Speaker 1: at Well, Stanford, and the essentially boils down to offering
Speaker 1: a subject the choice of getting a treat now or
Speaker 1: waiting some time to get a better treat. Leader Basically,
Speaker 1: do you have self control and can you think about
Speaker 1: different possible futures and trade off what feels good now
Speaker 1: for what feels better later. It was originally done with kids,
Speaker 1: but since then it's been adapted to all kinds of animals,
Speaker 1: like monkeys and crows and even rats.
Speaker 2: So in rats and pigeons, they're willing to wait a
Speaker 2: few seconds and then they kind of give in, whereas
Speaker 2: in your larger brain, vertebrates like crows and chimpanzees, they
Speaker 2: wait up to two, three, four minutes.
Speaker 1: So then doctor Schnell wondered, what if you do this
Speaker 1: experiment with a cephalopart.
Speaker 2: And so I decided to adapt it, and I swapped
Speaker 2: out the marshmallows for different types of shrimp because a
Speaker 2: marshmallow would not be tempting for a cuttlefish.
Speaker 1: Did you try shrimp marshmallows?
Speaker 2: I hold my should off. So essentially I created two
Speaker 2: different clear treat boxes. They learned that one the door
Speaker 2: would open straight away and the other one the door
Speaker 2: would only open after a delay. And the really neat
Speaker 2: thing about it is they showed similar coping mechanisms to
Speaker 2: what you see in children to kind of cope with
Speaker 2: the temptation of that treat. So they'd turn their body
Speaker 2: away and not look at the treat, which you see
Speaker 2: in a lot of kids, kind of closing their eyes.
Speaker 1: And that's incredible. Did they cry for mommy also or not?
Speaker 3: Quite?
Speaker 1: So if they opened one box, they couldn't open the other.
Speaker 1: I guess somehow the animal knew that they had to choose.
Speaker 2: That's right. So I expected the cuttlefish to wait a
Speaker 2: few seconds, and I was blown away because there was
Speaker 2: differences amongst individuals. But my most patient subject write it
Speaker 2: for two and a half minutes.
Speaker 1: Wow, and that must be ages for a cuttlefish. So yeah,
Speaker 1: cuttlefish are as strategic or as patient as perhaps a
Speaker 1: chimpanzee or a five year old kid. Okay, So now
Speaker 1: the question is what does this all mean to any
Speaker 1: of these examples? Tell us just how smart an octopus is?
Speaker 1: Is it smarter than a cat or a monkey or
Speaker 1: an elephant. When we come back, we'll tackle that question
Speaker 1: and we'll get to one of the biggest mysteries about
Speaker 1: octopus intelligence that still puzzle scientists today. So stay with us,
Speaker 1: we'll be right back. Welcome back. All right. We're talking
Speaker 1: about how smart octopuses are, and so far we've talked
Speaker 1: about their evolution, their brain is like, and we talked
Speaker 1: about some of the pretty clever things they can do.
Speaker 1: Here are two more. The first is that they're not
Speaker 1: to work with other species. Here's how doctor Tamark good
Speaker 1: Nick describes it.
Speaker 4: Another thing that we see is intraspecies cooperation. So there
Speaker 4: are some studies that show that octopuses work together with
Speaker 4: certain types of fish, and that's something that we've heard
Speaker 4: for ages from divers and fishermen, and now we have
Speaker 4: more systematic observations of that happening.
Speaker 1: What do you mean they work with fish.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of species that actually cooperate. You
Speaker 4: have one animal that protects and the other animal that hunts.
Speaker 4: There are all kinds of cooperations, and we're not completely
Speaker 4: sure what each one of them contributes exactly to the cooperation.
Speaker 4: Which one is the protection, which one is the hunting.
Speaker 1: You're not sure which one drives the getaway car.
Speaker 4: Yes, we're not sure which one's driving the getaway car,
Speaker 4: and which one's responsible for cleaning after. It's very new
Speaker 4: and it's very interesting.
Speaker 1: Now. The thing about working with other animals is that
Speaker 1: lots of species do it. A lot of animals, including
Speaker 1: insects and even shrimp, have symbiotic relationships with other animals.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean they're necessarily smart. It could just
Speaker 1: be instincts they're born with. But in octopuses, doctor Goodnik
Speaker 1: says that's not the case.
Speaker 4: But with octopuses, some of them, you'll see some of them.
Speaker 4: You want, so, is this something that the animal picks up? Wait,
Speaker 4: this works. This one isn't food. This one's actually useful.
Speaker 4: In a way that size of fish would be food,
Speaker 4: like everything is for octopus potentially food. But that's not
Speaker 4: the type of interaction that they have.
Speaker 1: In other words, it's not something you see in every
Speaker 1: octopus of a certain species, which means it's probably something
Speaker 1: they're learning to do on the fly. And the other
Speaker 1: last example of how smart octopuses are is that apparently
Speaker 1: they're pretty good actors. Restarctor alec Schnell.
Speaker 2: So there's another octopus in the same area. It mimics
Speaker 2: other animals, and so this is the mimic octopus, and
Speaker 2: it will mimic not only the appearance but also the
Speaker 2: behavior of other animals, so it might look like a flatfish,
Speaker 2: a lionfish, or a sea snake. And what's really interesting
Speaker 2: is they tend to do it depending on who's watching.
Speaker 2: And so if they come across stams or fish, for example,
Speaker 2: they will then bury six of their arms into the
Speaker 2: sand and then keep two of their arms out and
Speaker 2: take on the pattern of abandoned sea snake and move
Speaker 2: their arms like abandoned sea snake.
Speaker 1: No kidding, that's incredible. Yeah, So they can not only
Speaker 1: change the patterns, but they can sort of morph into
Speaker 1: these other animals. Yes, okay, but now you're probably pretty
Speaker 1: convinced that octopuses and cuttlefish are fairly smart. Now we're
Speaker 1: going to tackle two questions about that. First is why
Speaker 1: are they so smart? As it turns out, this is
Speaker 1: a huge puzzle for octopus scientists because octopuses don't live
Speaker 1: very long. Here's how doctor Jennifer Mather puts it.
Speaker 3: Because the octopus only loves a year or two.
Speaker 1: Really wow, yes, so short lived?
Speaker 3: And this always bothers us. Why do they have to
Speaker 3: be so smart when they're so short lived?
Speaker 1: But why does it bother us?
Speaker 3: With the normal model you would have would be that
Speaker 3: it would be good for you to have a long
Speaker 3: life span because there would be lots of things that
Speaker 3: you learned and loss of time to learn them. But
Speaker 3: if you're not gonna live very long, why learn so much?
Speaker 4: Uh huh?
Speaker 3: So that bothers us?
Speaker 1: It doesn't make sense. So a typical octopus only lives
Speaker 1: about a year or two, which makes being that smart
Speaker 1: and being able to learn so much seem kind of
Speaker 1: a waste. Why would the octopus evolve to be so
Speaker 1: smart if it's not gonna live very long? Now that's
Speaker 1: an open question. We don't know the answer, but one
Speaker 1: theory is that maybe we're just looking at it the
Speaker 1: wrong way.
Speaker 2: Most species live one to two years. They're like the
Speaker 2: rock stars, you know, live fast, die young. And also
Speaker 2: they don't have parental care, so they're not learning from kin,
Speaker 2: they don't live in groups, they don't learn from individuals
Speaker 2: around them. So what we think is that that's probably
Speaker 2: a reason why they are such advanced learners, because they
Speaker 2: take every opportunity that they can to learn from the
Speaker 2: environment around them. They don't have anyone a parental figure, sisters,
Speaker 2: brothers that are helping them learn, and because of the
Speaker 2: short lifespan, they've just got to do everything really quickly.
Speaker 1: Do they have to learn on their own? Yeah? Wow.
Speaker 1: So whereas with us and other smartish animals like cats, dogs, crows,
Speaker 1: we became smart because we had long lives and lived
Speaker 1: in complex societies or groups of animals, the opposite might
Speaker 1: have happened in octopuses because they have such short lives.
Speaker 1: Because octopuses live on their own, they had to get
Speaker 1: smart to survive, which tells you that there's no one
Speaker 1: way to get to intelligence. We tend to think of
Speaker 1: how smart we are as something special or unique. But
Speaker 1: the truth is that intelligence is just one solution to
Speaker 1: the problem of staying alive. Meaning intelligence is not something
Speaker 1: that's uniquely human or special. It's just something that can
Speaker 1: help you solve a problem out in the wild.
Speaker 4: I think intelligence is an involved function of the necessity
Speaker 4: to solve the world, right, to get through life. It
Speaker 4: doesn't lie in a certain brain area because the brain
Speaker 4: areas that have it are so completely different than different animals. Right,
Speaker 4: So it's an evolved solution to similar problems, and you
Speaker 4: can build up to it in different ways. Yeah, you
Speaker 4: obviously life has managed to reach the solution several times.
Speaker 4: In a way. It's a product of living.
Speaker 1: I guess, which kind of makes you wonder what would
Speaker 1: happen if octopuses could live longer?
Speaker 2: I know, I always think about how terrifying or cool
Speaker 2: it would be if cephalopods lived for really long. Surely
Speaker 2: they'd take over the world.
Speaker 1: You just made me a little scared there, all right.
Speaker 1: The last question I asked our experts was how smart
Speaker 1: exactly are octopuses and cuddlefish? How do they compare to
Speaker 1: other species or even to us. If you had to
Speaker 1: compare the intelligence of an octopus to another reference animal.
Speaker 1: Would you say something like, it's smarter than a cat,
Speaker 1: it's smarter than a dog or a three year old human?
Speaker 1: What would you say.
Speaker 4: Then? I would probably politely decline. I mean, I think
Speaker 4: it's a very human way of thinking about it. In
Speaker 4: a way, what is it smarter than?
Speaker 1: It's not useful to compare.
Speaker 4: No, it's not really useful to compare. They all have
Speaker 4: a set of tasks to solve, and each one of
Speaker 4: them has a different way of solving them.
Speaker 1: There's many ways to define intelligence. Intelligence is not one thing.
Speaker 2: I think that it's also a bit misleading to rank
Speaker 2: their intelligence on a human centered scale. So I like
Speaker 2: to say that each species has evolved to be a
Speaker 2: master of its own domain. Octopuses excel at things that
Speaker 2: a human could never do, complex three dimensional navigation, manipulating
Speaker 2: objects with eight different arms, and their cognitive abilities reflect
Speaker 2: a very different, but equally I think sophisticated form of intelligence.
Speaker 2: They have a taste by touch sensation, so that they
Speaker 2: can taste with their suckers when they feel certain objects
Speaker 2: or substances. It's kind of like having a tongue and
Speaker 2: nose and a fingertip all in one.
Speaker 1: I see and so they're somehow able to process a
Speaker 1: lot of sensory information in the way that we could
Speaker 1: never even maybe imagine. Okay, so you wouldn't try to
Speaker 1: quantify their intelligence relation to other animals, Like if I
Speaker 1: ask you, are they smarter than a dog? Are they
Speaker 1: smarter than a three year old human?
Speaker 2: I think you can quantify it. I just don't like
Speaker 2: to rank them, so, you know, and sometimes I get
Speaker 2: that a lot, and I just say, look, you know,
Speaker 2: cattlefish can wait for a better trait for two and
Speaker 2: a half minutes. How long can your yeah, your three
Speaker 2: year old break a second marginal?
Speaker 1: Okay? In the episode, I'm going to let doctor Mather
Speaker 1: have the last word. If you had to sum up
Speaker 1: fifty years of studying octopuses, what's the thing that you
Speaker 1: would most want people to take away?
Speaker 3: That's they're very smart, that there are many ways of
Speaker 3: being smart, and that many different animals are pushed in
Speaker 3: many different directions by their environment. There's a wonderful varietio there,
Speaker 3: and I'd love to learn more about it.
Speaker 1: Thanks to all our experts joining us, and thank you
Speaker 1: for wrapping your arms around this mystery with us. See
Speaker 1: you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Hey Cham,
Speaker 1: edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland and audio
Speaker 1: engineer and mixer Chandler Mace. And you can follow me
Speaker 1: on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
Speaker 1: name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
Speaker 1: sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll
Speaker 1: be back next Wednesday with another episode.