about the episode
Octopuses are among the smartest invertebrates on Earth. The animal has not only a skeleton, eight flexible arms that can move independently of each other, but also a very complex nervous system.
In the brain of an octopus, you will find a large number of neurons and parts of the brain. We know very little about what exactly they do, and what we do know comes mainly from experiments in which those parts of the brain were deliberately damaged to see what functions then fail.
In other animal species, brain activity is also studied by placing electrodes and measuring brain activity, but this does not work well for octopuses. Not only do they not have a solid structure for their body to attach anything to, the animals can also pick loose anything attached to one of their eight arms with ease.
Now, for the first time, researchers have succeeded in measuring brain activity in live, freely moving octopuses for 12 consecutive hours. This was achieved by inserting electrodes and a data recorder into animals in a research laboratory and removing them after measurement. He did not say if this was painful or upsetting to the animals.
According to the researchers, it gives us important information about the general development and development of the brain and its association with behavior. The octopus brain is complex, but it evolved along a very different evolutionary path than ours. In their research, they saw brain activity similar to that of other animal species, but also one that had not been seen before.
They want to study this further. But despite the fact that it may provide us with interesting knowledge, you might wonder if that is reason enough to do this kind of research.
Read more about research here: Scientists have recorded the first-ever brain waves from freely moving octopuses.
