Machines Like Us

One difficulty to understanding consciousness is the fact that we know of only one species that certainly possesses it: humans. A new article by Jennifer Mather suggests that octopi may also possess consciousness, despite the vastly different architecture of their brain.

Octopus brains are striking different from those in primates (for example, 3/5 of all their neurons are actually outside the brain). They also seem to have evolved a brain almost completely independently from those in mammals. Despite these differences, octopus brains also have ventricles, lobes, nuclei and in some cases regions that appear homologous in architecture to human learning and memory areas, such as the hippocampus.

Read full story in Developing Intelligence