Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, And The Deep Origins Of Consciousness Quotes
"This bay is well-known for diving, but divers usually visit only a couple of spectacular locations."
"The octopuses watched Matt, and also watched one another."
"They watched you closely, usually maintaining some distance, but often not very much."
"Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals."
"The history of animals has the shape of a tree."
"The other well-known cephalopods are nautiluses, deep-sea Pacific shellfish which live quite differently from octopuses and their cousins."
"Octopuses show a stronger tactile interest."
"These creatures were the last common ancestors of yourself and an octopus, of mammals and cephalopods."
"The human-octopus ancestor lived at a time when no organisms had made it onto land."
"The book aims, then, to treat the mind and its evolution, and to do so with some breadth and depth."
"The octopus does have a special relation to the history of the mind."
"For most of the Earth’s history, then, there was life, but no animals."
"One of the best-studied systems of this kind is seen in the familiar E. coli bacteria."
"A bacterium is so small that its sensors alone can give it no indication of the direction that a good or bad chemical is coming from."
"Sensing and signaling between organisms gives rise to sensing and signaling within an organism."
"The actions of one animal created opportunities for and demands on others."
"The most startling finding in recent work on animal intelligence is how smart some birds are, especially parrots and crows."
"Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be characteristics of this creature."
"Octopuses can open screw-cap jars for food, and one has even been filmed opening such a jar from the inside."
"Octopuses in at least two aquariums have learned to turn off the lights by squirting jets of water at the bulbs."
"Soon we were chugging out on his small boat to a spot in the middle of his bay, where he set the anchor and we swam down the line, observed by just a few small fish."
"If we had air enough and time, I don’t know how long we’d stay down there. When the site is active, it’s enthralling."
"An arm, or two, might come back in response, and this leads sometimes to a settling-down, with each octopus going on its way, but in other cases it prompts a wrestling match."
"Other octopus manipulations of foreign objects are done for more practical reasons."
"In order to study changes in the shell bed, I once brought out some stakes and hammered them into the sea floor to mark the site’s approximate boundaries."
"The coconut-house behavior illustrates what I see as the distinctive feature of octopus intelligence; it makes clear the way they have become smart animals."
"The history of large brains has, very roughly, the shape of a letter Y."
"In the previous chapter, using some ideas from Michael Trestman, I said that across the wide range of animal body plans, only three groups contain some species with 'complex active bodies.'"
"Octopuses have not dealt with this challenge by imposing centralized governance on the body; rather, they have fashioned a mixture of local and central control."
"Perhaps most oddly, the esophagus, the tube that carries food from the mouth into the body, passes through the middle of the central brain."
"This profound indifference is seen in some cuttlefish as they go on looping excursions around their reefs."
"Touring cuttlefish can sometimes be friendly or at least curious, stopping to peer at you before swimming on."
"Being ignored so deeply makes you wonder if you are entirely real in their watery world, as if you are one of those ghosts who does not realize they are a ghost."
"Cephalopods, in almost all cases, are said to be color-blind."
"How can you match colors you cannot see?"
"What could it be like to see with your skin?"
"The mix of yoga and courtly dance suffices to determine which cuttlefish is larger, and the larger almost always prevails."
"Cuttlefish sex, if it results, is a peaceful affair by the standards of the animal kingdom."
"Intermediate between the clear cases of camouflage and of signaling are deimatic displays."
"Evolution is not heading anywhere, not toward us or anyone else."
"A person is just a bundle or collection of images and feelings, 'which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.'"
"Inner speech can also be a medium of experiment, for putting ideas together to see what comes of the combination."
"Their [cephalopods'] lives are short because their vulnerability tunes their lifespan."
"The cuttlefish had no teeth or bones or armor. Rather than a flattened serpent, it looked like a toy hovercraft."
"This octopus brooded her eggs for longer than any other known octopus is thought to live in total, and the fifty-three months it spent there is the longest egg-brooding period reported for any animal species."
"Much of life runs in slow motion in cold water."
"The fact that the Monterey octopus successfully brooded eggs in the open suggests that this species had less to fear from predation than other octopuses do."
"Putting these things together, we can see how many of the features of cephalopods—especially those features so pronounced in the octopus—might have stemmed from the abandoning of the shell all those years ago."
"Pale and quiet, they looked like cephalopod ghosts."
"Our pale head-like cameras on little tripods might look a bit like intruders of some kind—perhaps static, erect, three-legged cephalopods."
"The existence of episodic-like memory in all these groups—mammals like us, birds, cuttlefish—is a striking example of what is almost certainly parallel evolution in these different lines."
"The sea does not change visibly as we do things to it—not in the way that cutting down a forest is immediately, undeniably visible."
"When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all."