The Instinctive Engineer - Part 2: The Octopus and the Cathedral - Rethinking Where Intelligence Lives

The Instinctive Engineer 1 The Instinctive Engineer - Part 1: When the Assembly Line Broke the Human Spirit 2 The Instinctive Engineer - Part 2: The Octopus and the Cathedral - Rethinking Where Intelligence Lives 3 The Instinctive Engineer - Part 3: From Products to Processes - The Unseen Rise of the 'Do-It-Myself' Economy 4 The Instinctive Engineer - Part 4: Learning to Swim in a Sea of Data - Why We Must Fail to Move Forward 5 The Instinctive Engineer - Part 5: Building the Self-Supporting Society - Engineering for Human Flourishing ← Series Home 600+ Muscles humans coordinate in real-time for simple motions like hammering ...

Octopus camouflaged on coral reef

The Alien Lesson: How the Octopus Thinks Without a Central Brain

The octopus is one of the ocean’s most mesmerizing inhabitants, a creature of undeniable mystique that seems to watch us from across an evolutionary chasm. Yet behind this familiar image lies a biological truth so strange it deconstructs our most fundamental ideas about what it means to have a brain, to be intelligent, and even to be a unified “self.” It is an intelligence forged in pressures alien to our own, a consciousness so thoroughly embodied that it blurs the very line between mind and flesh. ...