EMOTION OCTOPUS PORTABLE

'Exactly how organized brain matter gives rise to images and sounds, lust and hate, memories, dreams and plans, remains unclear,' Christof Koch, chief science officer at the Allen Institute of Brain Science, and co-presenter of the new declaration, recently wrote in the Huffington Post. But this new, formalized conception of consciousness does suggest that the octopus has used its own, more foreign-looking brain to develop some sense of subjective experience. That does not necessarily mean that you could have a distraught octopus or an elated cuttlefish on your hands. In fact, many other neural regions are activated when we emote and 'are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals,' the scientists noted. octopus).'Įven emotions (or, according to the declaration, their 'neural substrates') are not dependent on an animal having particular brain structures, such as our cortex, after all. But, as the authors of the new declaration noted, many nerve networks involved in 'attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g.

Older models of brain activity lodged complex, conscious experiences-like musing about a piece of music or reminiscing about a piece of cake-in our highly evolved cortex. What was keeping scientists from accepting the existence of consciousness outside of our own family tree? Simple brain anatomy. And laboratory experiments show a distinct change in behavior when octopuses are kept in tanks that do not have enough enrichment objects to keep them stimulated. Anecdotal reports from researchers, such as Jennifer Mather, describe watching octopuses in the wild make errands to collect just the right number of rocks to narrow the opening to a desired den. Other research has documented sophisticated spatial navigation and memory.

EMOTION OCTOPUS PORTABLE

A 2009 study showed that some octopuses collect coconut shells to use as portable shelters-an example of tool use, according to the researchers. And plenty of research has been accumulated to back up this assertion. The octopus is the only invertebrate to get a shout-out at all. 'Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.' 'The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,' the scientists wrote. This privileged state of subjective awareness in fact goes well beyond Homo sapiens, according to the new Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (pdf), which was signed last month by a group of cognitive neuroscientists, computational neuroscientists, neuroanatomists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists who attended the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals at Cambridge University in the U.K. So should we humans really be surprised that ' consciousness' probably does not only exist in us? Chimpanzees teach youngsters to make tools.

Emotion octopus