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DOMINIC SIVITILLI: We are not the only kinds of intelligence.
But it's important to consider the diverse forms
the mind can take on Earth and in the universe beyond.
DAVID GIRE: I think we need to understand
how brains evolved to work.
So what we're looking at is a completely different
neural architecture.
DOMINIC SIVITILLI: I first gained interest
in the mind of the octopus when I
was in a lab full of marine invertebrates.
There was one of those animals that
seemed to be studying me as much as I was studying it.
I am Dominic Sivitilli.
I am a graduate student in behavioral neuroscience
and astrobiology at the University of Washington.
DAVID GIRE: The octopus fits into our research program
because they stand out as an extreme example of intelligence
that has evolved along a completely different trajectory
than that of the vertebrates.
Yet, the octopus is solving many of the same problems
that you or I would solve.
My name is David Gire.
I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology
at the University of Washington, and my lab
studies comparative systems neuroscience.
That means we study how different kinds of brains
process information.
In the broad sense, octopus nerves do function like ours.
They have physiological properties
that are very similar.
And yet, they're forming networks
that are completely different from the networks we
see in our brains.
DOMINIC SIVITILLI: So it takes more time
for information in the octopus' nervous system
to get from point A to point B compared to vertebrates whose
neurons can fire a lot faster.
Because it takes so long, how these systems are designed
plays a much bigger role in how they can compute.
DAVID GIRE: The octopus' brain is distributed with 2/3
of its neurons in its arms.
There is actually this dense network
of neural clusters or ganglia that are locally
controlling the muscles.
So you can have a bunch of little individual decisions
being made along the arm which don't necessarily
agree with each other.
This creates a unique form of movement
that the octopus is able to possess.
If we're watching a rodent look for some food pellets,
we're seeing some nice rhythmic motion.
But when we watch an octopus, it's
almost like watching the fluid environment itself
moving across the surface of the rocks.
There's an extreme density of chemoreceptors
in the suckers of the octopus.
They literally can smell and taste with their arms.
So it seems like the way the octopus deals
with having eight independent arms
and having to process all that sensory information is that it
has located a lot of the sensory processing
as close as possible to the external world.
DOMINIC SIVITILLI: In a way, the octopus
has sent its mind out into the environment to meet it halfway.
The key to understanding their intelligence
is to understand how this distributed network is sharing
information with itself.
DAVID GIRE: LEGOs are a form of enrichment
in the lab, much the same way they
are for my four-year-old kid.
We try to give them a variety of these kinds of textures
so that this extensive peripheral nervous system they
have is always kept occupied and active.
DOMINIC SIVITILLI: No matter how hard one can work in that lab,
we'll all still spend a few minutes playing with them.
This is really important to them,
because they're very exploratory,
they're very curious animals.
And at the same time as enriching them,
we can also study how their arm is processing information
and how their suckers are processing information.
DAVID GIRE: In designing puzzles that these animals will solve,
we're looking to challenge different parts
of the nervous system and to see how information is going to be
integrated across the arms.
DOMINIC SIVITILLI: Where we began
a two-dimensional tracking, now our methods
are more sophisticated.
We now use three-dimensional tracking cameras,
which are stereo cameras.
And this is helping us understand the strategies
that the octopus is using to control its distributed mind.
And we can interface that with virtual reality.
This will help us pick out patterns
that we may not have seen before.
It gives us an entirely different perspective
on our data and the movement of our animals.
DAVID GIRE: So we can infer what might
be going on in their brains by using puzzles and motion
tracking.
But to really test that we need to move
towards electrophysiology and make recordings
from the nervous system while the animals are
making decisions.
You can imagine trying to fit electronic hardware
onto an animal like that is probably nearly impossible.
Yet, we're at a really exciting point now in the lab.
We're using techniques that have been pioneered by Josh Smith's
lab in computer science and engineering
to use a wireless battery-free system to implant
tiny electronics into large octopuses.
So once we do a small incision, implant the device,
the animal will never have to think about it again.
And we as researchers can stream the data and power the device
without ever disturbing the animal.
In some ways, this is a watershed moment
in general for science.
If we understand how a neural structure
like the octopus nervous system can solve difficult problems,
we might be able to design better ways
to solve similar problems artificially.
DOMINIC SIVITILLI: We reach out to them
across the evolutionary divide out of curiosity to understand
this unknown as they are.
So it's like we're meeting each other halfway
through our mutual interest in novelty in the unknown.
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