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Squidward

I have been sick for the past week and half of my spring break, so I am double posting today to make up for the lack of content. Soon after we finished our final draft for our interview assignment we began getting ready for a book review. My professor presented a list of books within the last year or two that would make good choices for a paper, and one of them, Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of Cephalopods instantly grabbed my attention. I have always been interested in intelligence in animals other than humans and I decided on the spot to stop looking and pick that one. Upon further research, Squid Empire isn’t available at my school so I looked into what else I could find on cephalopods related to their intelligence. An equally interesting title, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, came up in my search and I requested it to be shipped to my campus. A scientist with philosophic leanings, Godfrey-Smith discusses the cephalopods, an evolutionary branch far removed from ours but that have convergently evolved complex nervous systems capable of complex thought. I’ll post a follow-up blog once I read a significant portion of the book but for now I found a relevant paper that also discusses intelligence among cephalopods titled “the cephalopod specialties: complex nervous system, learning, and cognition”. The article discuses the unique and decentralized structure of their brains and how cephalopods are “first and foremost a learning animal”. Their abilities to maneuver their arms and coordinate complex camouflage coloration are also discussed.

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