“The octopus is a stupid creature, for it will approach a man's hand if it be lowered in the water,” wrote Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago in History of Animals. But octopuses’ inquisitive behavior has, in more recent years, helped tip scientists off to their smarts.
Films like the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher and essays like Sy Montgomery’s “Deep Intellect” paint octopuses as curious, sensitive and even playful creatures.
Is an Octopus Smart?
The more that researchers examine octopus genetics, brains and sensory capabilities, the more they find startling similarities to our own minds, hand in hand (or sucker-covered arm in sucker-covered arm) with bizarre differences between how our species experience the world.
Octopuses are mollusks, the same phylum that clams and snails belong to. We split off evolutionarily from each other about 600 million years ago; our most recent common ancestor is a flatworm. Despite this evolutionary distance, our brains have some core elements in common.
