I used to think octopuses were just, like, weird sea blobs with too many arms.
Turns out—and I mean this literally changed how I see intelligence itself—these creatures possess problem-solving abilities that rival some primates, and they do it with a nervous system that’s fundamentally alien to ours. About 60% of an octopus’s neurons are actually in its arms, not its brain, which means each limb can essentially think independently while still coordinating with the central nervous system. Researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole have documented octopuses unscrewing jar lids from the inside, navigating mazes that would stump most mammals, and even recognizing individual human faces—not through some instinctual pattern-matching, but through genuine learning and memory formation. The cognitive architecture here is so different from vertebrate intelligence that studying it feels less like comparative biology and more like xenobiology, except the aliens are right here in our oceans.
Here’s the thing: octopuses are basically solving problems with a distributed intelligence model that tech companies are only now trying to replicate in AI systems. Each arm processes sensory information locally, makes decisions about texture and grip strength, and only reports back to the central brain when it encounters something genuinely novel. I’ve seen footage of an octopus named Inky—who famously escaped from New Zealand’s National Aquarium in 2016—and the way he assessed his environment, waited for the right moment, and then executed a multi-step escape plan was honestly unsettling.
The Coconut Shell Architects Who Rewrite Tool Use Definitions
In 2009, researchers observed something that shouldn’t have been possible according to our understanding of invertebrate cognition.
Veined octopuses off the coast of Indonesia were collecting coconut shell halves, carrying them awkwardly across the seafloor (which left them vulnerable to predators), and then assembling them into protective shelters later—sometimes much later, like hours or even days afterwards. This isn’t reflexive behavior or simple object manipulation; it’s delayed gratification and planning, cognitive abilities we used to think required a cerebral cortex. The octopuses were sacrificing immediate safety for future benefit, which implies they can model future states and weigh trade-offs. Julian Finn, who led the study, described watching them stagger around with these shells and thinking they looked ridiculous until he realized they were essentially carrying emergency housing. Wait—maybe that’s not so different from humans lugging camping gear into the wilderness, except octopuses invented this strategy independently about 300 million years after our evolutionary paths diverged.
When Memory Contradicts Everything We Know About Invertebrate Brains
Octopuses only live for roughly one to two years, give or take, depending on the species.
You’d think that would limit their learning capacity, but these animals demonstrate both short-term and long-term memory that would be impressive in creatures with ten times their lifespan. In laboratory settings, octopuses have been observed opening childproof containers—not through trial and error, but by watching other octopuses do it first and then replicating the technique immediately. That’s observational learning, which requires not just memory but the ability to translate visual information into motor actions performed by a completely different body configuration. Jennifer Mather at the University of Lethbridge documented octopuses remembering specific humans who fed them versus those who poked them with sticks, maintaining these distinctions for weeks. One octopus definately learned to spray water at a particular researcher it didn’t like, but only when that specific person was in the room—suggesting not just recognition but something closer to grudge-holding, which feels uncomfortably human.
The Puzzle Of Distributed Consciousness And What It Means For Mind
Anyway, here’s where it gets philosophically weird.
If an octopus’s arms can each process information and make decisions semi-independently, where exactly does “the octopus” begin and end as a cognitive entity? Researchers have documented severed octopus arms continuing to hunt, crawl, and even avoid threats for hours after detachment, responding to stimuli with what looks disturbingly like purposeful behavior. Peter Godfrey-Smith, who wrote the book “Other Minds” about octopus cognition, describes watching an octopus coordinate its eight arms while simultaneously changing color patterns across its skin and processing visual information through an environment—all of this happening in parallel, not sequentially like human thought tends to operate. It’s a kind of intelligence that’s fundamentally multithreaded, and I guess it makes sense that a creature without a centralized brain would evolve this way, but it still challenges our basic assumptions about what consciousness even is. Maybe intelligence doesn’t require the kind of unified, narrative sense of self that humans experience; maybe it can be distributed, fragmented, and still be incredibly effective at navigating complex environments and solving novel problems.
Why Evolution Gave Them This Gift Then Threw It Away
The tragedy—and I mean this is genuinely kind of heartbreaking from a scientific perspective—is that octopuses don’t pass knowledge between generations.
They’re semelparous, meaning they reproduce once and die, and the mothers don’t survive to teach their offspring anything. Every octopus essentially reinvents octopus culture from scratch, learning everything through individual trial and error or observation of unrelated adults. Imagine if humans had to rediscover language, tool use, and social structures every single generation without any cultural transmission. That’s the octopus condition, and yet they still manage to develop complex problem-solving strategies within their brief lifespans. Some researchers speculate that if octopuses lived longer or developed social structures that allowed knowledge transfer, they might have evolved toward something resembling civilization, but evolution doesn’t optimize for potential—it optimizes for survival in specific ecological niches, and apparently being a solitary, short-lived genius was the winning strategy for these animals. I used to wonder what octopuses might achieve with just a few more years of life, but honestly that question probably says more about my human biases than about what octopuses actually need to be successful as octopuses.
