Nine Brains, Three Hearts, and No Spine. Meet the Octopus.

Up until now we’ve been learning about how to be more efficient and productive in our business by studying honey badgers and crows in the wild. The national geographic business theme will continue … and we will be learning about the Octopus for a few weeks.

Why the octopus? Why indeed.

While honey badgers and crows are obvious teachers for business … the more alien octopus probably seems like an odd and mysterious choice. What could I possibly learn from something that doesn’t even live in the same environment?

Mysterious because … frankly, we know and understand so little about them.

To start with, the octopus has nine brains. One central brain, and another one in each of their arms. Each arm contains its own neural cluster capable of independent decision making. Two thirds of the octopus’s neurons live in its arms, not its central brain. The crow, the honey badger, everyone reading this only has the one brain and we’re just doing the best we can.

If an octopus loses one of its arms … that arm will continue responding to stimuli for up to an hour. It does not need the central brain to function.

The octopus has three hearts and blood that is blue. Its evolutionary path is completely independent from our own and every other intelligent vertebrate. Intelligence as we currently define it anyway.

It follows then that the intelligence they possess developed entirely separately from the way our own intelligence developed. It’s a little meta to consider that our brain, our own intelligence, is attempting to understand the difference between how it thinks and operates compared to some other intelligence completely alien to it. And yet here we are talking about it.

Did you know that octopi are completely colorblind? In spite of that they are able to match the color, texture, and pattern of their surroundings within milliseconds … well enough to fool predators with far more sophisticated visual systems.

How do they do that? We don’t know. The current hypothesis involves photoreceptors in the skin itself … which means they may be seeing with their entire body rather than isolating it to just the eyes.

And when they’re in camouflage, they’re not just trying to blend in, they’re performing. They will mimic specific other animals, flounders, lionfish, sea snakes, selecting different species depending on which predator they’re evading. The choice is deliberate, contextual, and almost instantaneous.

9 brains!

This may come as no surprise after the comment about vertebrates, but the octopus does not have a skeleton. The only rigid structure in their body is their beak, which is about the size of your thumbnail. That means the only opening it can’t fit through is one that is smaller than their beak. Everything else is negotiable.

Oh and they can taste with their suckers. Each one contains chemoreceptors that identify what they’re touching as they touch it.

9 brains really open up some weird possibilities.

And lastly, even though we heard about the benefits of having a supportive family and community when exploring the crow … the octopus lives mostly by itself. Juveniles receive no instruction, no modeling, and have no community. Their mother dies right after they hatch.

Everything the octopus knows, everything it learns, it learns entirely alone, entirely within its own short lifespan of about one to two years.

Now, there’s no way for you to abandon your spine, see with your skin, and start tasting with your fingertips … no way to get your toes to start thinking for themselves. But … there is clearly a lot to learn from the octopus.

We’ll be exploring how they overcome the challenges they face, and how they use what is unique about them to great effect.

Email me and let me know if you can spot the business insights here.