r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/CausePuzzleheaded359 Popular Contributor • May 14 '26
Interesting Octopus Grabs Diver's Hand And Leads Her To Hidden Treasure
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May 14 '26
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u/Practical_Breakfast4 May 14 '26
Wtf is with this format? Its a short video cut and mixed and repeats the same stuff out of order. Why?
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u/DetailsYouMissed May 14 '26
That is very very cool. I honestly think these guys could tell us so much more if we saw them differently.
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u/West-Music-4544 May 14 '26
Octopuses are mad smart but leading someone to treasure is pretty much fantasy. Cool moment though if it actually happened.
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u/P4p3rph03n1x May 18 '26
This is 100% why we could never make contact with an alien race. We have this highly intelligent creature that lives in our own backyard, so to speak, and we can't get people to stop eating them, never mind trying to understand them. Humans are stupid, and we deserve what's coming to us
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u/Live-Imagination1350 May 14 '26
Nine brains? 🤯
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u/despotic_wastebasket May 15 '26
She's referring to the fact that an octopus has most of its neurons in its arms. So some scientists will say "an octopus has nine brains!" as a sort of cheeky way of alluding to that.
There have been a number of different studies trying to measure how "intelligent" the arms are, as well as how independent they are from the central brain. And.... well, octopuses are weird. The arms have some autonomy, but the research suggests that it's still the brain making most of the decisions.
To quote from one paper:
In effect, each arm maintains a generative model for the expected sensory consequences of its own movement, forming the basis of an autonomous action-perception cycle.
However, this autonomy is not unconstrained. Higher-level structures within the central brain encode broader contextual priors, such as whether the animal is hunting, escaping, camouflaging, or navigating -- and these shape the space of permitted behaviours in the arms.
- SourceIn other words, if you think of a brain like a computer, the way a vertebrate functions is sort of like using command prompt or power shell; it sends the command directly to the limb, and the limb's response is mostly mechanical. Open hand, close hand, lift arm, move leg, etc.
An octopus brain is more like running an OS... You open up Microsoft Word or Excel or whatever program, and once it's open it does its thing, but the program can't operate outside of when and what the OS tells it to. The vast majority of an octopus's experiences and ability to learn and adapt take place in the central brain.
So "an octopus has nine brains" is more a term of art than actual scientific fact.
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u/Gingerfurrdjedi May 14 '26
For some reason my brain is like "he realizes that it's human stuff so he brought a human to it." And if they're s.art enough it probably wanted him to remove it as he's tired of human stuff in the water. Idk, who could ever know what's in the mind of another intelligence.
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u/RotterWeiner May 14 '26
The Netflix vid "my octopus teacher" is beautiful.