It’s a shared sweetness, a gentle miracle, an uplink to universal consciousness—the notion, first advanced by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in 480 BC, of sharing an intelligence that animates and organizes all life. The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the “collective

In 2009, researchers in Indonesia documented octopuses that were carrying around pairs of half coconut shells, which they used as portable Quonset huts. With obvious effort, the octopuses would lug the shell halves, nested one inside the other, beneath their bodies as they walked stiff-armed across the sandy bottom, then assemble the half shells

wild octopuses who live in tidal areas often haul themselves out on land in order to visit different tide pools for better hunting. They may also do this to escape predators in the water, such as another octopus. I had read that in areas blessed by constant ocean spray, an octopus might be able to survive out of water for thirty minutes or more.

The slits of her pupils always remain horizontal, no matter what position she is in, cued by balance receptors called statocysts. These saclike structures are lined with sensory hairs and equipped with small, mineralized balls that shift inside the statocyst in response to motion and gravity. But the always-horizontal pupil can change dramatically

researchers found the skin of the octopus’s close relative, the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the retina of the eye.

Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one—which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glittering rainbow of colors, technically color-blind. How, then, does the octopus decide what colors to turn? New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin.

The human brain, for instance, is organized into four different lobes, each associated with different functions. An octopus brain, depending on the species and how you count them, has as many as 50 to 75 different lobes.

Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface—all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. This process

Neurons in the brain fire in distinctive patterns while a rat in a maze performs particular tasks. The researchers repeatedly saw the exact same patterns reproduced while the rats slept—so clearly that they could tell what point in the maze the rat was dreaming about, and whether the animal was running or walking in the dream. The rats’ dreams took