Sleeping Octopuses May Have Dreams, But They're Probably Brief (npr.org) 40
According to a report in the journal iScience, octopuses may have short dreams during their alternating periods of sleep. NPR reports: [Sidarta Ribeiro, a neuroscientist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil] and some colleagues decided to video-record four adult octopuses in the lab to monitor their sleep. And to make sure the animals were genuinely sleeping, the researchers checked to see if they would respond to a video of a swimming crab, a favorite food item, or to a vibration made by a hammer tapping on the tank. The octopuses remained indifferent and difficult to arouse while sleeping, instead of reacting as they normally would when awake. The scientists found that the octopuses had periods of quiet sleep, when they were pale and still, followed by short bursts of active sleep. This cycle repeated every 30 to 40 minutes. The active sleep periods were brief but obvious; the octopuses' skin darkened and their bodies and suckers contracted.
"For around 40 seconds, they dramatically change their color and their skin texture. Their eyes are also moving," says Sylvia Medeiros, a graduate student at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. "All of this happens very conspicuously." Their dreams, if they have them, can't be terribly complex or symbolic, given how short these active phases are, says Medeiros. Octopuses are known to be problem solvers, however, so maybe dreams help their impressive, unusual brains consolidate memories and improve on tasks.
"For around 40 seconds, they dramatically change their color and their skin texture. Their eyes are also moving," says Sylvia Medeiros, a graduate student at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. "All of this happens very conspicuously." Their dreams, if they have them, can't be terribly complex or symbolic, given how short these active phases are, says Medeiros. Octopuses are known to be problem solvers, however, so maybe dreams help their impressive, unusual brains consolidate memories and improve on tasks.
You might be amazed (Score:4, Insightful)
Their dreams, if they have them, can't be terribly complex or symbolic, given how short these active phases are, says Medeiros.
It's rather amazing how much you can dream in 40 seconds.
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"... the researchers checked to see if they would respond to a video"
Do all octopuses (octopodes?) even see video? I've had dogs which can, and some which are totally oblivious. Sure, not the same, but still...? It seems octopuses are pretty intelligent, so perhaps they're simply fucking with the researcher
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It's a good question. Cephalopods have a very different eye structure than vertebrates. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I know the structure of their eye means they have no blind spot where the optic nerves wire into their brain, and I think octopuses have color vision.
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Unlike us the blood supply of cephalopods runs behind the light sensing cells so their eye is much more efficient, has no blind spot, and suffers less damage if struck. Ours is the exact opposite, with the arteries and veins running over the top of the light sensing cells. (It's an example I occasionally use with creationists.) Their color sensing cells evolved differently than ours as well.
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Their neurology is also very different. Octopus have a brain like many other multicellular animals, called the "crown", but they also have a lot of processing power in their arms, so there's a sort of cooperative parallel processing between these different processing centers. These are animals that evolved a startling different neurology than vertebrates. Probably the biggest thing that stopped octopuses from ruling the world is that they are very short lived. Make a long-lived octopus, and we might have on
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Wrote a science fiction story (never bothered to get published) where octopuses were the space ship pilots because they were better adapted to navigating in three dimensions than humans, they were grateful to humans for breaking their single spawning life cycle.
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Haha,
that is funny.
I read such a story!! Perhaps it is yours and one stole it from you and published it.
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The need to forget (Score:2)
Sleep helps us forget parts of our day to remember other parts and more so, consolidate the patterns of our daily lives. The unconscious mind is just reflecting on these patterns in an abstract manner when we "dream". This is why dream interpretation is one of the oldest forms of divination and is found in many traditional religious texts. That is to say it takes a rather gifted individual to interpret our dreams because they are our subconscious expresses which can be polar and at odds with our conscious
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Not a proven.
Yeah, no. [sleepfoundation.org]
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Well,
I usually decide about what I want to dream before I go to sleep.
And then I dream about that. Better than TV.
The question is (Score:5, Funny)
Do octopuses dream of electric eels?
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Maybe it was dreaming of getting ten tickles?
Do sleeping octopuses (Score:5, Funny)
Dream of Japanese girls?
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The real question is (Score:2)
Do cephalopods dream of aquatic sheep?
Anthropomorphising (Score:1)
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu (Score:4, Insightful)
R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
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Typical biologists POV ... not science (Score:2)
The observation "Their dreams, if they have them, can't be terribly complex or symbolic, given how short these active phases are ... " is so typical. It seems akin to someone looking at Rembrandt painting and saying "You couldn't possibly store something this big on a tiny computer chip."
The fundamental question to ask the biologist in question is: "Do you understand how the octopus brain works in detail?"
And the answer is: "No".
Maybe octopii can have extended dreams in a very short period of time.
That sa
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> Maybe octopii can have extended dreams in a very short period of time
So do humans, afaik. Btw. there's one i to many in your plural. Not even that, just read "octopi" is incorrect, it's octopuses
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Octopus n. pl. -puses, -pi
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"Do you understand how the octopus brain works in detail?"
Since we don't even understand how the mammalian brain works in much detail and we've been studying it for thousands of years I don't think that the octopus has much to worry about yet. Still, I'd be interested in seeing what the difference between readings from a Neuralink install on an octopus and one from a human or dog might be, it would probably be quite illuminating as to the evolutionary differences between the two phylums.
I've often wondered why an animal that developed such a big brain is unable to overcome its one spawning cycle life span, since there doesn't seem to be any obvious biological reason why they stop eating.
Everyone sleeps (Score:3)
Even through their brains are so distinct from ours, octopuses also engage in the bizarre, time consuming, dangerous and unexplained processes of sleeping and dreaming. It's amazing that something is so fundamental, but its purpose is still poorly understood.
Re:Everyone sleeps (Score:4, Interesting)
What's being described here sounds like an analog of REM sleep in vertebrates. One of the theories surrounding dreaming may be that the braining is managing and pruning long term memory, reworking synaptic connections, and that leads to a sort of replaying of the encoded memories, which is why we experience dreams; a byproduct of a sort of basic memory management process. If brains have a major function, it's pattern matching to create coherent models of the world our senses report to us, so other parts of the brain, being stimulated by this strange memory replay and pruning process, do their darndest to make it seem coherent.
Now the neurology of octopuses is very very different to vertebrates, so I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a one-to-one match, but perhaps these cognitive processes that go on during sleep phases date far back in the evolutionary history of Animalia, when the evolution of sophisticated neural networks with the ability to encode and store previous events required a bit of pruning now and again because of storage and processing limits.
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Octopuses are fascinating (Score:2)
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Their habitual cannibalism probably doesn't help either.
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Well, there are octopus cities and other communities under the sea.
So perhaps the little ones do learn from elder ones: if they do not get eaten first by them.
https://www.sciencealert.com/m... [sciencealert.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]