Here, an octopus holds an amputated arm from a different octopus as though it were food.

Contrast that video with this one, in which an octopus is given its own amputated arm:

An octopus grasps the arm only at the amputation site, where flesh is exposed, and then brings the arm to its beak (not the flesh part of its mouth like it would do with food.) More often, though, the octopus avoided touching its own amputated arm altogether.

Left to their own devices, octopus arms connected to the same body will repel each other. But these examples show that sometimes (in the case of amputation, for instance), the octopus brain itself can overrule the arm’s independent “decisions.”

Goldman comes to an interesting conclusion regarding these tendencies. He writes that they illustrate how “complex behaviors can emerge from a set of simpler reflexes.” In other words, it’s not that octopuses are self-aware—their instincts just generate behaviors that look like they’re complicated cognitive processes. Thus, cognition isn’t necessary to explain all forms of self-recognition.

Here’s Yong again:

The octopus… well… embodies this idea. Its brain governs many of its decisions and exerts control upon its arms, but the arms can do their own thing, including getting out of each others’ way. The animal doesn’t need to know the location of each of its arms to avoid embarrassing entanglements. It can let its arms do the work of evading each other.

But of course, when push comes to shove, the octopus’s central brain has the final say. Understanding this type of body “awareness” in the natural world could have implications for soft robotics:

This concept might be useful for designing robots. A typical robot, like Honda’s ASIMO, relies on top-down programs that control his every action. He can pull off pre-programmed feats like dancing or running, but he trips over even minor obstacles. He’s inflexible and inefficient. By contrast, Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog relies on embodied cognition. His springy legs are designed to react to rough terrain without needing new instructions from his central processor.

A robot with body part that can interfere with each other, though, could be more efficient than any of these options, and could set the stage for a new generation of bio-inspired devices.

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Photo Credit: Joachim S. Mueller / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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