How the Octopus May Change Our View of Human Cognition

Are aliens among us? Some marine biologists may be able to convince you that indeed there are. The precocious underwater group of marine creatures known as cephalopods sparks interest and intrigue in every marine field due to their unique and beautiful features. Cephalopods (which include the octopus, squid, cuttlefish, and nautilus) belong to the Mollusca phylum and possess a large head, bulbous eyes, and sprightly tentacles. The reason these animals seem so celestial to biologists comes from both the evolutionary history of the cephalopod and the baffling complex cognitive abilities that have resulted from their unique evolution. Who would have thought that an animal evolutionarily neighboring snails would be able to calculate an escape from an aquarium tank all the way back to their home in the ocean? (Bilefsky, 2016) Cephalopods present us with a brilliant opportunity to further advance our understanding of intelligence and cognition; examining comparative cognition with a focus on differences in nervous system structure between cephalopods and humans could yield a great deal of information on neural structure/function relationship and the connection to intelligence.

Cephalopod nervous systems are by far the largest out of all invertebrates and are significantly more complex than other animals in the Mollusca phylum (which includes snails and…