B4
THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2022
Stephani Gordon/Oregon Public Broadcasting
An octopus named ‘Lizbeth’ is helping
scientists study distributed intelligence
in a lab in the San Juan Islands.
Scientist looks to octopuses
to understand life in space
By AARON SCOTT
Oregon Public Broadcasting
If you wanted to study
how aliens might think, but
you didn’t have the ability to
travel light-years into space
to fi nd them, where would
you look?
For scientist Dominic Siv-
itilli, a doctoral candidate in
astrobiology and psychology
at the University of Washing-
ton, the answer is under the
sea.
“The octopuses’ long, sep-
arate evolution toward cogni-
tive complexity makes them
a very appropriate model for
what intelligence might look
like if it evolves on a com-
pletely diff erent planet,” he
said.
What makes the octo-
puses’ mind so foreign to
ours is not just that they
evolved intelligence in a
cold, dark, underwater set-
ting, nor that our last com-
mon ancestor was a worm
some 350 million years ago
— although those things cer-
tainly help. The key diff er-
ence is that the majority of
the cephalopod’s neurons are
not in a central brain. They’re
spread out between the arms
and suckers, which do a lot
of thinking on their own. It’s
like if our arms and fi ngers
could process the world on
their own.
Sivitilli calls it distrib-
uted intelligence, and it’s the
focus of his research at Fri-
day Harbor Laboratories in
the San Juan Islands.
“This is ‘Lizbeth,’” said
Sivitilli, taking the lid off one
of the plastic tubs that fi ll his
small research room.
As he lowered his fi ngers
to the surface of the water,
a small octopus came up to
meet them.
“She’s our giant Pacifi c
octopus,” he said. “She can
grow to being well over 20
feet long if she spread her
arms out.”
Right then, her arms
spread only a foot or so, as
they explored Sivitilli’s fi n-
gers. But while his fi ngers
can feel the texture and tem-
perature of Lizbeth’s arms
and the pull of the suckers as
they attach, Lizbeth’s suckers
can feel far more.
“Our fi ngertip might have
400 mechanical receptors,”
he said. “A given sucker
might have tens of thou-
sands of mechanical and
chemical receptors on it. So
each sucker is many times
more mechanically sensitive
than one of our fi ngertips is,
and it also has the benefi t of
being able to taste and smell
the world around it. And it is
able to do this because each
sucker has a local compu-
tation center, where most
of this information is being
processed.”
In other words, the suck-
ers not only feel, taste and
smell: Each sucker basically
has a mini mind of its own.
“It’s really hard to imagine
how these animals are expe-
DENTAL HYGIENIST
THE MAJORITY OF THE
CEPHALOPOD’S NEURONS ARE
NOT IN A CENTRAL BRAIN. THEY’RE
SPREAD OUT BETWEEN THE ARMS
AND SUCKERS, WHICH DO A LOT OF
THINKING ON THEIR OWN. IT’S LIKE
IF OUR ARMS AND FINGERS COULD
PROCESS THE WORLD ON THEIR OWN.
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riencing the world,” Sivitilli
said. “Their nervous system
and their perceptions and sen-
sory systems are built entirely
diff erently from ours. While
most of our neurons are in
our brain, most of their neu-
rons exist beyond their cen-
tral brain in their arms and
suckers.”
Of the roughly 500 million
neurons in the octopus, fewer
than 150 million are in the
central brain and optic lobes.
The rest are in the arms and
suckers.
And yet, octopuses are
notoriously intelligent crea-
tures, able to solve complex
puzzles and escape many a
lab setting.
To try to fi gure out how
this distributed intelligence
works, Sivitilli created a plas-
tic puzzle box that contains
holes giving the octopus’ arms
access to changeable rows of
crevices similar to what it
would fi nd in a rock wall or
reef. Sivitilli hides a piece of
shrimp in one of the crevices
and attaches the box to the
side of the tank, where he can
fi lm the arms as they explore
the box with their suckers and
then analyze their process.
“There seems to be a strat-
egy that the suckers use to
coordinate,” said Sivitilli.
“And this strategy seems to
rely on a recruitment mech-
anism. So if one sucker fi nds
something of interest, so if it’s
like a clam or mussel or some
kind of prey — a sucker will
fi nd that prey, and then it will
tell the next sucker over, ‘Hey,
I found something of inter-
est.’ And that sucker will turn
toward that prey.”
It’s a bit like a sucker chain
reaction, and the more suckers
that get involved, the higher a
signal they send to the brain.
Sivitilli compared the arms
and suckers to our smart-
phones: They process a lot of
code in the background and
only show the brain the stuff
it wants to see.
Spreading its brain out
amongst its arms serves an
evolutionary purpose. Unlike
humans and other simple ver-
tebrates, which can only move
our arms and legs in a cou-
ple of directions, an octopus
can bend its eight arms with
seemingly infi nite freedom.
Add the fact that they mostly
hunt at night when they can’t
see, and that’s a lot of infor-
mation for the brain to process
all at once.
“What the brain will do is
send out a very generalized
command to multiple arms at
once and let the arms kind of
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fi gure it out from there,” Siv-
itilli said. “At that point, the
suckers seem to be guiding a
lot of the behavior. And the
suckers — with all their che-
moreceptors, all their mechan-
ical receptors — are very well
equipped to then fi nd inter-
esting objects out there in the
world.”
And in the lab, Sivitilli is
one of the most interesting
things for them to fi nd.
“If they sense me around
the lab, or if they see some-
one around the lab, they will
approach, go to the edge of
their tank and just watch the
interesting things that are hap-
pening,” he said. “It’s a very
uncanny feeling, being con-
stantly watched and being
constantly observed. You
never really feel like you’re
alone in that lab.”
Their curiosity is one of
the fi rst things that fascinated
Sivitilli. It’s almost as if, as he
studies them, they study him
back in their own way.
“In my time studying the
octopus, I’ve really learned to
appreciate that there are many
varieties of intelligence out
in the world and possibly the
universe. The human mind
is just one of many diff erent
varieties,” Sivitilli said. “It’s
not about how intelligent they
are. It’s about how they are
intelligent.”
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