How many brains does an octopus have

Hi everyone! My name is Maya, and I’m a student at Vanderbilt studying Neuroscience. The brain is one of the most fascinating yet lesser understood organs in the body. One of the weirdest things I’ve learned in my neuroscience classes has to do with the octopus brain. These mysterious creatures are known to be incredibly intelligent. In fact, octopuses can even open jars ( In one of my neuroscience classes, my professor asked the class where we thought the octopus brain might be, and we all pointed to the head. Little did we know, the octopus head is actually where its stomach is located! Instead, the octopus brain is located right between its eyes and below the stomach. So how does the octopus get food from its mouth past the brain to the stomach? In octopuses, the esophagus, which is a tube that carries our food from our mouths to our stomachs, actually runs through the brain. If an octopus eats a large creature, the esophagus will stretch out into the brain to get that creature down its esophagus. Another fun fact about the octopus is that each of its 8 arms has a mini brain inside of it! Around 60% of octopus neurons, or the cells that make up the nervous system/brain, are found in the arms, allowing the octopus arms to act alone without the instruction of the brain. So next time someone asks you about octopuses, you can tell them these really cool fun facts! *Adapted from https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/how-the-octopus-got-its-smarts/

Deep-sea thinkers • Octopuses and their kin (cuttlefish and squid) stand apart from other invertebrates, having evolved with much larger nervous systems and greater cognitive complexity. • The majority of neurons in an octopus are found in the arms, which can independently taste and touch and also control basic motions without input from the brain. • Octopus brains and vertebrate brains have no common anatomy but support a variety of similar features, including forms of short- and long-term memory, versions of sleep, and the capacities to recognize individual people and explore objects through play. Adapted from by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (U.S.), HarperCollins (U.K.) Someone is watching you, intently, but you can't see them. Then you notice, drawn somehow by their eyes. You're amid a sponge garden, the seafloor scattered with shrublike clumps of bright orange sponge. Tangled in one of these sponges and the gray-green seaweed around it is an animal about the size of a cat. Its body seems to be everywhere and nowhere. The only parts you can keep a fix on are a small head and the two eyes. As you make your way around the sponge, so, too, do those eyes, keeping their distance, keeping part of the sponge between the two of you. The creature's color perfectly matches the seaweed, except that some of its skin is folded into tiny, towerlike peaks with tips that match the orange of th...

Picture this: Earth has made its first contact with an extraterrestrial species, and, as to be expected, their anatomy and nervous system are entirely different from our own. Rather than having a single brain where all sensory information and motor controls are processed, they have nine brains. Rather than having a rigid skeleton, they have compact arrays of muscle tissue that stiffen and soften when they move, and their many limbs have an infinite number of degrees of freedom. Oh, and they can only breath underwater, too. What was just described isn’t an alien at all, but actually the complex anatomy belonging to a common octopus, otherwise known as Independent Thinkers Each arm of an octopus is able to control itself semi-independently from the central brain. An octopus has about 500 million An experiment shows that an electrically stimulated octopus arm (right), when detached from its central nervous system , will still move in the same basic patterns as an arm naturally controlled by an octopus (left). Image modified from G. Sumbre, Science Magazine. Master Delegaters So how does this partially de-centralized nervous system work? The octopus does, in fact, have a central brain located between its eyes containing about 180 million neurons. This is the part of the nervous system that determines what the octopus wants or needs, such as if it needs to search for food. These are sent as messages through groupings of neurons. Commands like “search for food” are then received...

Key Points • Unlike other animals, fishes, birds, and reptiles, octopuses are entirely different in every way. • Octopuses have nine brains! • They are very intelligent and use their nine brains to control their eight different limbs. • They can also learn how to perform tasks such as solving mazes, completing tasks to get food, and even getting themselves in and out of locked containers. In many ways, Unlike most creatures, octopuses have nine brains, and they put them to incredibly adept use. Given all the brainpower they ostensibly have, shouldn’t A coconut octopus walking on a sea bottom with a big coconut shell. ©Agarianna76/Shutterstock.com Only The Top 1% Can Ace our Animal Quizzes Think You Can? Take Our Brand New A-Z-Animals Octopus Quiz Nine Brains: The Anatomy of an Octopus’s Nervous System Octopuses possess a central brain. Situated between their eyes, this brain has a distinct doughnut-like shape, forming a ring around the creature’s esophagus. Technically, when an octopus ingests food, it passes through the “center” of this central brain. This is just one of many facts highlighting how different the anatomy of an octopus’s nervous system is compared to vertebrates and many other invertebrates. Neurons are like messengers that send signals and information from the brain to various parts of a creature’s body. Across its entire body, the typical Octopus vulgaris – possesses approximately 500 million neurons. That may sound like a lot, but humans have upwards of ...

An octopus is a lot brainier than you might imagine considering one of its closest living relatives is a sea slug. In fact, some scientists argue it could be the first intelligent being on the planet. They can complete puzzles, untie knots, open jars and toddler proof cases, and are expert escape artists from aquariums. Even more fascinating—their intelligence stems from a completely unrelated path to human intelligence, and about two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms, not their head.