The amazing brains and morphing skin of octopuses and other cephalopods Roger Hanlon
This is a strange and wonderful brain,
one that gives rise to an idea
of a kind of alternative intelligence
on this planet.
This is a brain that is formed
in a very strange body,
one that has the equivalent
of small satellite brains
distributed throughout that body.
How different is it from the human brain?
Very different, so it seems,
so much so that my colleagues and I
are struggling to understand
how that brain works.
But what I can tell you for certain
is that this brain is capable
of some amazing things.
So, who does this brain belong to?
Well, join me for a little bit
of diving into the ocean,
where life began,
and let’s have a look.
You may have seen some of this before,
but we’re behind a coral reef,
and there’s this rock out there,
a lot of sand, fishes swimming around …
And all of a sudden this octopus appears,
and now it flashes white,
inks in my face and jets away.
In slow motion reverse,
you see the ring develop around the eye,
and then the pattern develops in the skin.
And now watch the 3-D texture
of the skin change
to really create this
beautiful, 3-D camouflage.
So there are 25 million color organs
called “chromatophores” in the skin,
and all those bumps out there,
which we call “papillae,”
and they’re all neurally controlled
and can change instantaneously.
I would argue that dynamic camouflage
is a form of “intelligence.”
The level of complexity of the skin
with fast precision change
is really quite astonishing.
So what can you do with this skin?
Well, let’s think a little bit
about other things besides camouflage
that they can do with their skin.
Here you see the mimic octopus
and a pattern.
All of a sudden,
it changes dramatically –
that’s signaling, not camouflage.
And then it goes back
to the normal pattern.
Then you see the broadclub cuttlefish
showing this passing cloud display
as it approaches a crab prey.
And finally, you see the flamboyant
cuttlefish in camouflage
and it can shift instantly
to this bright warning display.
What we have here
is a sliding scale of expression,
a continuum, if you will,
between conspicuousness and camouflage.
And this requires a lot of control.
Well, guess what?
Brains are really good for control.
The brain of the octopus shown here
has 35 lobes to the brain,
80 million tiny cells.
And even though that’s interesting,
what’s really odd is that
the skin of this animal
has many more neurons, as illustrated
here, especially in the yellow.
There are 300 million neurons in the skin
and only 80 million in the brain itself –
four times as many.
Now, if you look at that,
there’s actually one of those
little satellite brains
and the equivalent of the spinal cord
for each of the eight arms.
This is a very unusual way
to construct a nervous system in a body.
Well, what is that brain good for?
That brain has to outwit
other big, smart brains
that are trying to eat it,
and that includes porpoises and seals
and barracudas and sharks
and even us humans.
So decision-making is one of the things
that this brain has to do,
and it does a very good job of it.
Shown here, you see this octopus
perambulating along,
and then it suddenly stops
and creates that perfect camouflage.
And it’s really marvelous,
because when these animals
forage in the wild,
they have to make over a hundred
camouflaging decisions
in a two-hour forage,
and they do that twice a day.
So, decision-making.
They’re also figuring out where to go
and how to get back home.
So it’s a decision-making thing.
We can test this camouflage,
like that cuttlefish you see behind me,
where we pull the rug out from under it
and give it a checkerboard,
and it even uses that strange
visual information
and does its best to match the pattern
with a little ad-libbing.
So other cognitive skills
are important, too.
The squids have a different
kind of smarts, if you will.
They have an extremely complex,
interesting sex life.
They have fighting and flirting
and courting and mate-guarding
and deception.
Sound familiar?
(Laughter)
And it’s really quite amazing
that these animals have
this kind of intuitive ability
to do these behaviors.
Here you see a male and a female.
The male, on the left,
has been fighting off other males
to pair with the female,
and now he’s showing a dual pattern.
He shows courtship and love on her side,
fighting on the other.
Watch him when she shifts places –
(Laughter)
and you see that he has fluidly
changed the love-courtship pattern
to the side of the female.
So this kind of dual signaling
simultaneously
with a changing behavioral context
is really extraordinary.
It takes a lot of brain power.
Now, another way
to look at this is that, hmm,
maybe we have 50 million years
of evidence for the two-faced male.
(Laughter)
All right, let’s move on.
(Laughter)
An octopus on a coral reef
has a tough job in front it
to go to so many places,
remember and find its den.
And they do this extremely well.
They have short- and long-term memory,
they learn things
in three to five trials –
it’s a good brain.
And the spatial memory is unusually good.
They will even end their forage
and make a beeline
all the way back to their den.
The divers watching them
are completely lost,
but they can get back,
so it’s really quite refined
memory capability.
Now, in terms of cognitive skills,
look at this sleeping behavior
in the cuttlefish.
Especially on the right,
you see the eye twitching.
This is rapid eye movement
kind of dreaming
that we only thought
mammals and birds did.
And you see the false color
we put in there
to see the skin patterning flashing,
and this is what’s happening a lot.
But it’s not normal awake behaviors;
it’s all different.
Well, dreaming is when you have
memory consolidation,
and so this is probably
what’s happening in the cuttlefish.
Now, another form of memory
that’s really unusual
is episodic-like memory.
This is something that humans need
four years of brain development to do
to remember what happened
during a particular event,
where it happened and when it happened.
The “when” part is particularly difficult,
and these children can do that.
But guess what?
We find recently that the wily cuttlefish
also has this ability,
and in experiments last summer,
when you present a cuttlefish
with different foods at different times,
they have to match that
with where it was exactly
and when was the last time they saw it.
Then they have to guide their foraging
to the rate of replenishment
of each food type in a different place.
Sound complicated?
It’s so complicated, I hardly
understood the experiment.
So this is really high-level
cognitive processing.
Now, speaking of brains
and evolution at the moment,
you look on the right, there’s the pathway
of vertebrate brain evolution,
and we all have good brains.
I think everyone will acknowledge that.
But if you look on the left side,
some of the evolutionary pathway
outlined here to the octopus,
they have both converged, if you will,
to complex behaviors
and some form of intelligence.
The last common denominator
in these two lines
was 600 million years ago,
and it was a worm with very few neurons,
so very divergent paths
but convergence of complicated behavior.
Here is the fundamental question:
Is the brain structure of an octopus
basically different
down to the tiniest level
from the vertebrate line?
Now, we don’t know the answer,
but if it turns out to be yes,
then we have a different
evolutionary pathway
to create intelligence on planet Earth,
and one might think that
the artificial intelligence community
might be interested in those mechanisms.
Well, let’s talk genetics
just for a moment.
We have genomes, we have DNA,
DNA is transcripted into RNA,
RNA translates that into a protein,
and that’s how we come to be.
Well, the cephalopods do it differently.
They have big genomes, they have DNA,
they transcript it into RNA,
but now something
dramatically different happens.
They edit that RNA
at an astronomical weird rate,
a hundredfold more than
we as humans or other animals do.
And it produces scores of proteins.
And guess where most of them are for?
The nervous system.
So perhaps this is an unorthodox way
for an animal to evolve
behavioral plasticity.
This is a lot of conjecture,
but it’s food for thought.
Now, I’d like to share
with you for a moment
my experience, and using my smarts
and that of my colleagues,
to try and get this kind of information.
We’re diving, we can’t stay
underwater forever
because we can’t breathe it,
so we have to be efficient in what we do.
The total sensory immersion
into that world
is what helps us understand
what these animals are really doing,
and I have to tell you that
it’s really an amazing experience
to be down there and having
this communication
with an octopus and a diver
when you really begin to understand
that this is a thinking, cogitating,
curious animal.
And this is the kind of thing
that really inspires me endlessly.
Let’s go back to that smart skin
for a few moments.
Here’s a squid and a camouflage pattern.
We zoom down and we see
there’s beautiful pigments and reflectors.
There are the chromatophores
opening and closing very quickly.
And then, in the next layer of skin,
it’s quite interesting.
The chromatophores are closed,
and you see this magical iridescence
just come out of the skin.
This is also neurally controlled,
so it’s the combination of the two,
as seen here in the high-resolution
skin of the cuttlefish,
where you get this beautiful
pigmentary structural coloration
and even the faint blushing
that is so beautiful.
Well, how can we make use
of some of this information?
I talked about those
skin bumps, the papillae.
Here’s the giant Australian cuttlefish.
It’s got smooth skin
and a conspicuous pattern.
I took five pictures in a row
one second apart,
and just watch this animal morph –
one, two, three, four, five –
and now I’m a seaweed.
And then we can come right back out of it
to see the smooth skin
and the conspicuousness.
So this is really
marvelous, morphing skin.
You can see it in more detail here.
Periscope up,
and you’ve got those beautiful papillae.
And then we look in a little more detail,
you can see the individual
papillae come up,
and there are little ridges on there,
so it’s a papilla on papilla and so forth.
Every individual species out there
has more than a dozen shapes and sizes
of those bumps
to create fine-tuned,
neurally controlled camouflage.
So now, my colleagues
at Cornell, engineers,
watched our work and said,
“We think we can make some of those.”
Because in industry and society,
this kind of soft materials
under control of shape
are really very rare.
And they went ahead, worked with us
and made the first samples
of artificial papillae, soft materials,
shown here.
And you see them blown up
into different shapes,
And then you can press your finger on them
to see that they’re
a little bit malleable as they are.
And so this is an example
of how that might work.
Well, I want to segue from this
into the color of fabrics,
and I imagine that could have
a lot of applications as well.
Just look at this kaleidoscope of color
of dynamically controlled
pigments and reflectors
that we see in the cephalopods.
We know enough about
the mechanics of how they work
that we can begin to translate this
not only into fabrics
but perhaps even
into changeable cosmetics.
And moreover, there’s been
the recent discovery
of light-sensing molecules
in the skin of octopus
which may pave the way
to, eventually, smart materials
that sense and respond on their own.
Well, this form of biotechnology,
or biomimicry, if you will,
could change the way we look
at the world even above water.
Take, for example, artificial intelligence
that might be inspired
by the body-distributed brain
and behavior of the octopus
or the smart skin of a cuttlefish
translated into cutting-edge fashion.
Well, how do we get there?
Maybe all we have to do
is to begin to be a little bit smarter
about how smart the cephalopods are.
Thank you.
(Applause)