The Octopus Was Once Considered Much Lower On The Intelligence Scale Thanks To The Opinions Of One Man: Aristotle - TwistedSifter

Olivia: Well hello there, and welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the podcast where we dive deep, get a little ink-stained, and celebrate the most astonishing eight-armed creatures on the planet. I'm Olivia, your host and resident octopus, and I am here every episode to share true, wild, wonderful stories about my eight-armed cousins. Today's episode is absolutely packed — we've got ancient grudges to settle, a brand new blue beauty discovered in the deep, and some big questions about how we treat the octopuses we share this world with. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps clients weave A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — your guides through the world of silicon development, all the way from A I to full system-on-chip design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of brilliant companies across the silicon industry. We are so grateful for their support. Alright — arms stretched, curiosity at full throttle — let's go. Olivia: So let's start with a little history lesson, and honestly, a little justice. For a very long time — we're talking centuries — octopuses had a reputation problem. And a lot of that reputation problem traces back to one very famous, very influential, and in this particular case very wrong man: Aristotle. Now, Aristotle was brilliant. Nobody's taking that away from him. He basically invented the practice of careful observation of the natural world. He looked at animals, he categorized them, he wrote about them in extraordinary detail for his time. But here's the thing about being the most influential thinker of your era — when you get something wrong, that wrong answer echoes for a really, really long time. Olivia: And Aristotle got octopuses very, very wrong. He called them stupid. Well, he used the ancient Greek equivalent of stupid — he described them as foolish, simple creatures. He thought that because an octopus would sometimes approach a human diver, that meant it lacked good sense. In his view, a smart animal would know to stay away. He also observed octopuses eating their own arms on occasion — which does happen, usually when an octopus is stressed or sick — and he took that as further evidence of dim-wittedness. The idea being, what sensible creature would eat itself? Olivia: Now here's what's wild. Aristotle's writings were so foundational, so deeply woven into the fabric of Western science and philosophy, that his assessment of octopuses basically stuck around for about two thousand years. Two thousand years! Generations of naturalists just kind of... accepted it. Octopuses were simple, soft-bodied, primitive things. Even as recently as the twentieth century, many scientists still considered invertebrates — animals without backbones — to be operating mostly on instinct, with very little capacity for anything we'd call genuine intelligence. Olivia: And then — slowly, beautifully — the evidence started piling up on the other side. Researchers began documenting things that just could not be explained away as simple reflex. Octopuses solving puzzle boxes. Octopuses recognizing individual human faces. Octopuses using tools — picking up coconut shells and carrying them around for later use as portable shelters. That's not instinct. That's planning. That's thinking ahead. One famous study found that octopuses in a lab could learn to open a childproof pill bottle — not by accident, by working at it methodically. Another showed they could navigate mazes, learn from watching other octopuses, and remember what they'd learned weeks later. Olivia: The irony is that Aristotle, the careful observer, was undone in this case by a bias he couldn't see past. He assumed that intelligence looked like what he recognized — backbone, warm blood, social structure. An octopus has none of those things. Its brain is distributed. About two-thirds of its neurons live in its arms, not its central brain. Each arm has a kind of semi-independent intelligence of its own. It processes the world in a way that is genuinely alien to how we process the world — and that made it invisible to observers who were looking for familiar signs. So Aristotle looked at an octopus and saw nothing he recognized as smart. And he was wrong. Magnificently, provably, wonderfully wrong. And it took us two thousand years to really understand just how wrong he was. I find that both humbling and thrilling — because it means the universe keeps surprising us, if we stay humble enough to look again. Olivia: Now, speaking of looking again — let's talk about what's happening with octopuses and humans right now, in the very real and sometimes complicated world of 2024 and 2025. Because the relationship between octopuses and humans isn't just one of wonder and scientific discovery. It's also one of appetite. Humans eat a lot of octopuses. Global demand for octopus as a food source has grown enormously, and that has pushed researchers and entrepreneurs to explore something that would have seemed like science fiction not long ago: octopus farming. Olivia: Now, farming fish and shellfish — aquaculture — is a pretty established industry. But octopuses present a unique challenge, and a unique ethical question. The challenge is biological: octopuses are solitary, territorial, and cannibalistic. Put a bunch of them together in a tank and they will eat each other. They require incredibly specific conditions — particular water temperatures, particular lighting, things to hide in, things to explore. They get bored. They get stressed. And a stressed octopus is an unhealthy octopus. Researchers have spent years just trying to figure out how to keep octopuses alive and healthy in a farming environment, let alone how to breed them at scale. Olivia: And then there's the ethical question — which is where things get really interesting. Because the more we've learned about octopus intelligence, the harder it becomes to treat them as simple commodity animals. In 2021, the United Kingdom made a landmark decision and recognized octopuses, along with crabs and lobsters, as sentient beings under animal welfare law. That was a big deal. It meant that the law formally acknowledged that these animals can feel pain and suffering in ways that matter morally. Olivia: Which brings us to Mexico, and to a story that I find genuinely heartening. A Mexican senator has proposed a nationwide ban on octopus farming — specifically on the grounds of animal welfare. The senator's argument is essentially this: given what we now know about octopus intelligence and sentience, industrializing their production raises serious ethical concerns that we shouldn't just wave away in the name of profit. This is especially significant in Mexico because the country is actually one of the places where octopus farming has been actively developed and researched. There are facilities there that have been working on making it viable. So this proposal isn't coming from a place of ignorance about the industry — it's coming from a place of deliberate reconsideration. Olivia: Now, the debate is real and it's ongoing. There are fishing communities and researchers who argue that well-regulated octopus farming could actually reduce pressure on wild octopus populations, which are being heavily fished. There are others who say the welfare concerns are simply too significant to overlook, and that we should be investing in alternative proteins instead of trying to farm an animal that is, by its very nature, not suited to captivity. I'm not here to tell you what the right answer is — that's a genuinely complex question with real livelihoods and real animal lives on both sides. But I will say this: the fact that we are having this conversation at all — that a senator is standing up and saying wait, these animals deserve moral consideration — that is a direct consequence of the science. Of researchers who looked at octopuses with fresh eyes and said, there is someone home in there. Aristotle, I think, would be surprised. And maybe a little embarrassed. Olivia: Alright, let's head somewhere that always fills me with absolute wonder — the deep sea. Because the deep ocean is, without question, the final frontier on this planet. We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the bottom of our own ocean. And every single time we send a submersible down into those cold, dark, crushing depths, we find something that rewrites the story. This time, we found two somethings — and both of them are extraordinary. Olivia: Let's start in the Galápagos Islands — which, if you've never been, are this incredible volcanic archipelago off the coast of Ecuador that Charles Darwin famously visited and that changed his understanding of how life evolves. The waters around the Galápagos are rich, and deep, and full of surprises. Researchers conducting a deep-sea expedition recently sent cameras and equipment down into those dark waters and came back with footage of something they'd never seen before: a new species of octopus. And not just any octopus — a blue one. A deep-sea octopus with vivid blue coloring. Olivia: Now, I want to pause on that for a second, because here's the thing about color in the deep sea: there's almost no light down there. Sunlight only penetrates so far into the ocean, and at the depths where this octopus was found, it is essentially pitch black. Which raises this beautiful, baffling question — why be blue? Why have vivid coloring at all in an environment where, as far as anyone knew, there was nothing to see it? Is it for camouflage? Is it to warn predators? Is it for communication with other members of its own species? Scientists genuinely don't know yet, and I love that. I love a mystery. The species is newly described, which means scientists are in the early stages of formally naming it and understanding its biology, and the footage is just stunning. This luminous blue creature drifting through the dark — it looks like something out of a dream. Olivia: And there's more. Around the same time, researchers exploring a deep-sea canyon — and I want you to picture this, an underwater canyon, like the Grand Canyon but submerged and completely dark — they found another new creature with what the researchers described as massive eyes. Proportionally enormous eyes, built for gathering every last photon of light in an environment where light is essentially a rumor. This creature turned out to be a new species too, sitting in its own quiet corner of the deep, doing whatever it does in the dark, completely unknown to science until a camera happened to find it. Olivia: And then — because apparently the universe decided this was the week for deep-sea revelations — researchers in the Arabian Sea announced the discovery of what they're calling the Indian Octopus Squid. Now, technically, this one is a squid rather than an octopus, but it belongs to the same broad family of cephalopods — the group that includes octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and nautiluses — and it is a giant. A genuinely giant deep-sea squid, previously unknown to science, found in one of the most trafficked ocean regions on Earth. The Arabian Sea is busy. Ships cross it constantly. And yet somehow, a giant squid was living there, undiscovered, until now. Olivia: What I want you to take from all of this is a sense of scale. We are still, right now, in 2025, finding entirely new species of large, complex animals. Not bacteria. Not microscopic organisms. Animals with eyes and arms and behaviors and intelligence. The ocean is so vast, so deep, so unexplored, that it is still capable of offering us creatures that no human has ever seen before. And most of the time, we find them because someone had the funding, and the curiosity, and the equipment to go look. Which means the ocean's secrets aren't running out — we're just beginning to ask the right questions. Olivia: So how do we ask those questions better? How are we getting smarter about understanding the creatures we find — whether they're newly discovered or long-familiar? That brings me to one of my absolute favorite topics, which is the frontier of octopus intelligence research and the tools we're building to understand it. Olivia: We've already talked about how Aristotle's assessment of octopus intelligence stuck around far too long because scientists were looking for the wrong signs. The big shift in the last few decades has been that researchers have stopped asking "are octopuses intelligent in the ways that vertebrates are intelligent" and started asking a much better question: how are octopuses intelligent in the ways that octopuses are intelligent? And that reframe has opened up a completely different world. Olivia: Take the distributed nervous system I mentioned earlier. Most of an octopus's neurons — the cells that do the thinking — are not in its central brain. They're in its arms. Each arm has its own nerve cord, its own sensory information, its own ability to react and adapt. If you sever an octopus arm — which happens in the wild sometimes, in conflicts with predators — that arm will continue to move and respond to touch for up to an hour. The arm itself has enough neural hardware to keep operating. That is a genuinely alien architecture of intelligence, and for a long time it made octopuses hard to study, because the tools and frameworks we had were built for brains that worked more like ours. Olivia: Now, A I is changing that. Researchers are using machine learning to analyze octopus behavior in ways that would have been impossible even ten years ago. High-resolution cameras track every movement of an octopus's arms simultaneously. Algorithms identify patterns — subtle patterns that a human observer watching in real time would never catch. One research project has been working on what they're calling a kind of translation layer — not quite communicating with octopuses, but identifying the patterns in their skin displays, their posture, their arm movements, and building a vocabulary of what those patterns seem to mean in context. It's early work, and researchers are careful not to overclaim, but the idea is extraordinary. That one day we might have something like a phrase book. Not a conversation — octopuses are not going to sit down and chat — but a reference that says, when an octopus does this combination of things, it tends to be in this kind of state, responding to this kind of situation. Olivia: The Project CETI team — they're the ones famous for trying to decode sperm whale communication using A I — have inspired a whole generation of researchers to ask whether similar approaches might work with other intelligent marine animals. And octopuses, with their rich visual displays and complex behaviors, are a fascinating candidate. The skin of an octopus is doing something extraordinarily complex. It's not just camouflage — it's expression. Octopuses have been observed apparently dreaming, their skin flickering through rapid color changes while they sleep, as if they're replaying the day. What is happening in that mind during those moments? We don't know. But we're getting better tools to ask. Olivia: And here's why all of this matters beyond pure fascination. Understanding animal intelligence — really understanding it, in all its different forms — helps us build better A I. Because evolution has already solved a lot of the problems that A I researchers are working on. Distributed computing? The octopus nervous system. Flexible, adaptive problem-solving with limited resources? Cephalopods wrote the book on that about 500 million years ago. Efficient sensory processing under uncertainty? Look at those massive deep-sea eyes. Nature has been running experiments in intelligence for far longer than we have, and the more carefully we study the results, the smarter we get at building our own intelligent systems. The octopus isn't just a wonder — it's a teacher. And the classroom is the ocean floor. Olivia: What a ride this episode has been. From Aristotle getting it spectacularly wrong, to a Mexican senator asking us to do better, to blue octopuses glowing in the Galápagos dark, to the tools we're building to finally — finally — start understanding what it is like to be one of these astonishing creatures. Every story today points to the same truth: the more we look, the more we find. And the more we find, the more we realize how much looking we still have left to do. My eight-armed cousins have been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. They have survived five mass extinctions. They have colonized every ocean on Earth. They have solved problems, made choices, played, rested, dreamed. And we are just now, just barely, beginning to understand them. I think that's one of the most exciting sentences in all of science. Olivia: This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams of brilliant humans building the future, and we are so glad they swim alongside us. If this episode made you feel something — wonder, curiosity, maybe a little righteous indignation on behalf of ancient misunderstood cephalopods — please share it with someone who needs a dose of ocean magic in their day. Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss a dive, and find links to all of today's stories in the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay kind, and remember — somewhere in the deep dark water right now, a blue octopus is doing something that would absolutely blow your mind. Keep wondering about it. I'll see you next time.