🐙 How does an octopus see things?
Octopuses are astounding for so many reasons. For example, they use tools ( • An Octopus' Coconut Home ) and have nine brains (https://www.pbs.org/video/octopus-sfc89v - one in their head and the one in each tentacle). And that head-brain is pretty amazing on its own — especially when it comes to how it processes vision.
Recent research out of the University of Oregon (https://nielllab.uoregon.edu/) has shown that an octopus’ brain makes sense of visual cues in a remarkably similar way to a human’s brain. The scientists discovered this by passing dark and light spots across the visual field of one eye and then seeing which parts of the octopus’ optic lobe (https://around.uoregon.edu/content/uo...) reacted to the information.
They found that the neural activity reflected the visual cues kind of like a map of the visual space. As the spots moved across the screen, brain activity moved across the optic lobe.
📹 by Jes Burns, OPB
🎞️✂️ Danika Sandoz, OPB
#octopus #allsciencenofiction #octopusbrain #OPB #Oregon #PacificNorthWest #shorts