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)