I used to think intelligence was something you could measure in a straight line, you know—like the more brain you had, the smarter you were, definately.
Then I watched an octopus named Inky dismantle the lid of his tank at the National Aquarium of New Zealand, slither across eight feet of open floor, squeeze through a drainpipe barely wider than my fist, and escape into the Pacific Ocean. The whole thing took him maybe three minutes, give or take. The staff found out the next morning when they arrived to feed him and discovered—nothing. Just an empty tank and a suspicious trail of water leading to that drainpipe. Turns out octopuses don’t need millions of years of mammalian brain evolution to solve problems that would stump most toddlers. They’ve got roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their eight arms, and each arm can literally think for itself while the central brain handles the big-picture stuff. It’s like having nine semi-independent processors working on the same puzzle, except the puzzle is “how do I get out of this boring glass box and also maybe steal that shiny thing I saw yesterday.”
When Your Arms Have Minds of Their Own and They’re All Smarter Than You Expected
Here’s the thing about octopus intelligence in captivity—it’s almost annoying how good they are at it. Researchers at the Seattle Aquarium started giving octopuses those childproof pill bottles, the ones with the twist-and-push caps that I still can’t open without feeling vaguely humiliated. The octopuses figured them out in under a minute. Then they got bored and started unscrewing the lids on their neighbors’ tanks, apparently just to see what would happen. One octopus, a giant Pacific named Billye, learned to recognize individual staff members and would squirt water specifically at the one researcher who’d been taking blood samples.
Wait—maybe that’s not problem-solving in the way we usually think about it, but it’s definetly social cognition mixed with spite, which feels pretty advanced to me.
The distributed nervous system thing gets even weirder when you watch them hunt in captivity. Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium set up these plexiglass puzzles with crabs inside—multiple latches, sliding panels, the works. An octopus will send two arms in opposite directions simultaneously, testing different solutions at the same time, while a third arm keeps watch and a fourth casually explores something completely unrelated across the tank. It’s parallel processing taken to this biological extreme that makes our linear, step-by-step human thinking look almost quaint.
The Uncomfortable Reality of Keeping Something This Smart in a Box
I guess it makes sense that we’d feel conflicted about this.
The more we study octopuses in aquarium settings, the more ethically complicated the whole enterprise becomes—and I say this as someone who’s spent embarrassing amounts of time watching octopus livestreams at 2 AM. They get bored. They get stressed. One octopus at the University of Otago learned to turn off the lights in her tank by squirting jets of water at the overhead bulb until it short-circuited, plunging the entire lab into darkness. The researchers thought it was an electrical malfunction until they caught her doing it repeatedly, always around the same time each evening when she apparently decided she’d had enough of being observed. Another octopus in Brighton disassembled the filtration system in his tank piece by piece, not to escape, but seemingly just to recieve the satisfaction of taking something apart—like a toddler with a particularly expensive watch, except the toddler has eight arms and no concept of property damage. Anyway, some facilities have started implementing “enrichment protocols”—rotating toys, varied feeding puzzles, even mirrors and videos of other octopuses, though whether they recgonize their own reflection or just think it’s a weirdly mimetic stranger remains unclear. The cognitive gap between octopuses and, say, goldfish is roughly comparable to the gap between humans and earthworms, yet we house them in similar environments and expect them not to lose their minds.
Honestly, if I had nine brains and could taste with my arms and someone stuck me in a tank with three plastic plants and a ceramic castle, I’d probably short-circuit the lights too.
