Are octopuses just like us?

The publicity frenzy over Paul the octopus, who accurately predicted the results of the World Cup by opening boxes labelled with team colours, has concealed something much more interesting than his apparent psychic powers. Here is an animal with a third of his nervous system outside his brain and no central spinal column who is nevertheless able to open man-made jars and boxes. This ‘lower form of life’, as we might once have called an invertebrate, can use tools, navigate mazes, recognise the humans that feed him, and make use of landmarks in planning a route.

Scientific interest in octopus intelligence is part of a quiet revolution in animal behaviour science. For generations, those studying animals were either ethologists, busy noting instinctive behaviour patterns in wild animals, or behaviourists, putting rats and pigeons into little boxes and studying how they responded either to punishing electric shocks or food pellet rewards.

Ethologists and behaviourists argued that animals did not have thoughts or feelings or, if they did, these were no concern of science. What could not be known ought not to be studied. To suggest otherwise was to commit the grave scientific sin of anthropomorphism. One of the most famous behaviourists, B.F. Skinner, inventor of the Skinner box for rats and pigeons, went so far as to claim that emotions were ‘excellent examples of the fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behaviour’.

Today, work with apes, elephants, dolphins and even octopuses like Paul suggests that animals are much cleverer than we thought — and they probably have feelings of joy and fear and anger much like we do. Some may even be self-aware. Moreover these animals, like human beings, have distinct personalities.