How Octopuses Upend What We Know About Ourselves
About this episode
Naturalist Sy Montgomery explains how octopuses challenge assumptions about consciousness: they have distributed nervous systems, individual personalities, long memories, and playful curiosity. She recounts years of observing two giant Pacific octopuses, Octavia and Kali, at the New England Aquarium, and describes forming genuine cross-species friendships with them. The conversation takes on anthropocentrism in science — how narrow definitions of intelligence miss other minds — and extends to the ethics of eating and confining animals, and to what octopus cognition suggests about our own minds and moral obligations toward creatures we barely understand.