Astrobiology, Octopuses and Alien Minds

Of the many papers and presentations scheduled for AbSciCon2019, the conference on astrobiology and the search for life in space happening in Bellevue, Washington, the week of June 24, Dominic Sivitilli’s is perhaps unique — he’ll discuss his research into how octopuses “think.”

More specifically, Sivitilli, a University of Washington doctoral student in behavioral neuroscience in the Department of Psychology, will explain the extraordinary way that octopuses gather information, and even make certain decisions, with their arms — and note the possible astrobiological benefit of learning about “the diversity of forms a mind can take.”

Sivitilli works with David Gire, UW assistant professor of psychology.

The nervous system of an octopus is very diffuse, Sivitilli said, and mostly located in the arms. “When I do my work I look at how the arms are acquiring information from the environment, and how they are collectively making decisions about that information. That’s where most of their nervous system is, and it allows them to process massive amounts of information in parallel.”

The octopus brain “offloads” some motor decisions to the arms, which are lined with suckers, each of which has tens of thousands of chemical and mechanical receptors, Sivitilli said.

Like other life forms such as ourselves, octopuses have evolved over 500 million years, but in a parallel way to vertebrates and through “entirely different neural architecture.”

“Their way of thinking is fundamentally different,” Sivitilli said. “We are not asking, ‘How intelligent are they? We are asking, ‘How are they intelligent?”

Sivitilli is a scientific scuba diver. He first studied the smaller red octopus, and then came to the UW’s Friday Harbor labs, a perfect place to study the behavior and cognition of much bigger Enteroctopus dofleini, or the giant Pacific octopus — the largest octopus species known.An East Pacific Red Octopus, Octopus rubescens, found near Whidbey Island, WA.