The octopus’s brain simply acts to coordinate the behaviors of its arms.Ĭephalopods have acute vision. When an arm is severed from an octopus’s body, it continues to show simple behaviors on its own, and can even avoid threats. Much of this sensory information is processed locally in the arms. Many of these receptors sense chemicals, corresponding roughly to our senses of taste and smell. By comparison, the human finger has only 241 sensory receptors per square centimeter. ![]() Each containing hundreds of suckers, with thousands of sensory receptors on each one. The animal’s eight arms are extraordinarily sensitive. He presented at the Puerto Rico workshop on cephalopod intelligence. David Gire is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington and a behavioral neuroscientist. In the octopus, sensing and moving are controlled locally in the arms, which together contain as many nerve cells, or neurons, as the brain. Although these animals have a sophisticated brain, their nervous systems are much more decentralized than that of familiar animals. It can give us a glimpse of the similarities and differences we might expect between aliens and ourselves.ĭavid Gire, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and researcher Dominic Sivitilli gave a presentation on cephalopods at the Puerto Rico workshop. Since this nervous system has a different evolutionary history than of the vertebrates, it is organized in a way completely different from our own. ![]() They show cognitive and perceptual abilities rivaling those of our close vertebrate kin. Public domain.Ĭephalopods include octopuses, squids, and cuttlefishes. The large bulbous structure below the eyes is the mantle, a muscular organ involved in swimming. The common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, Is a cephalopod mollusc, has evolved sophisticated cognition and perception along a very different evolutionary path than have human beings and our relatives. ![]() Although most molluscs, like slugs, snails, and shellfish, have fairly simple nervous systems, one group the cephalopods, have evolved a much more sophisticated one. Molluscs are another major group of animals that have been evolving separately from vertebrates for more than 600 million years. They are all descended from a common ancestor and share a nervous system organized according to the same basic plan. Many of the animals that we are most familiar with from daily life, like humans, cats, dogs, birds, fishes, and frogs are vertebrates, or animals with backbones.
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