Video: Reconstructing the Natural History of Awareness, David B. Edelman (DocDrop)

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so welcome to this uh weeks or this month's lecture of inter species conversations so this is a regular online lecture series that gives the opportunity to invite leading

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professors scientists and researchers to share and present work that contributes to advancing the acceleration and understanding of the diversity forms and functions of communication in other

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species So today we're joined by Dr Dave David Edelman and this will be a talk titled reconstructing reconstructing the natural history of awareness The Octopus

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as Muse and guide so cephalopod mollusks particularly the octopus have fascinated people across many cultures for thousands of years and they certainly Fascinate us here at

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induspices through their appearance it seems utterly alien to our human sensibilities that there is something strangely familiar and engaging about the countenance and behavior of these tantalizing animals

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in David's talk he will Begin by reviewing his own work as well as recent Revelations by other researchers regarding the nervous system and behavior of the octopus he will then explain why this animal

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certainly the most complex of all invertebras may provide a plausible window into the origins of sensory awareness as well as a useful model for studying Consciousness in animals

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without backbones so over to you David and thank you very much for joining us thank you very much Katie really appreciate it I'm just going to share my screen now

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and we'll see that this works I think it works yes everybody sees it good we see your screen you might want to put it in full screen mode we see some other aha interesting okay there we

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go there we go this is perfect gotcha okay great so thank you all for coming and thanks to thanks to everyone at interspecies internet for hosting this and for inviting me um it is a very sort of fascinating and

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Pregnant subject of course and you know just a mere few decades ago it probably would have been controversial enough to have not invited uh well not invited much sort of liberal discussion in and

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around it um but times have changed and I think it's it's a it's a sort of a very timely uh point that we find ourselves in so without further Ado I want to get started here let me just

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make sure I can get this screen moving hello okay so I'm going to give you kind of a Contours of the talk uh slide just to give you an idea of how I'm going to

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do this I'm going to talk about well Natural History evolutionary history really and the utility of what I call analogical reasoning and when I say analogical reasoning I'm talking about the idea that we can look at you know

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the remnants of creatures or evidence of creatures in a distance past to evidence of their behavior evidence of any number of things and we can kind of analyze it

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with regard to present-day animals their their biology their morphology their behavior and there's a great deal of there's a great deal of utility in this and I'll get into this in a minute I'm

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going to focus at the beginning on the so-called Cambrian explosion when I believe there was a real revolution in terms of a transform from sort of sexual

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2D environments to 3D environments and within a very short period of time well less than 40 million years eyes were sort of everywhere we went from eyeless creatures plants and Eyeless creatures

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to eyes everywhere and by the way when I'm talking about 2D to 3D transforming form in the Cambrian I'm talking about the idea of a sort of the sheet at the bottom of the ocean a very simple sort

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of sheet of growth not much else going on through the vertical column of the water but then a change happening and all of the sudden an environment sort of rich with sort of

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diverse life at different levels of of the water column and animals that began to move around among other things um I'm going to focus as well on animal

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eyes distance vision and the representation of space and time in the nervous system because I think these things are all inextricably linked and I hope I can persuade you of that as I go along I'm going to give you a definition

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of Consciousness because of course that is still somewhat controversial I have my own idea which you'll you'll see shortly we're going to talk about the octopuses model and Muse of course and then I'm going to kind of give you my

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take on what I believe to have been the natural history of or what I believe is the natural history of awareness a sort of a sequence of innovations that occurred that facilitated the appearance

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of consciousness on Earth so without further ado I'm going to start with an allegory it's not exactly a Shaggy Dog story I won't make it too quick because I want you

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guys to follow but it illustrates uh an important point about evolutionary history so I'm going to tell you the story first a guy is on his way home he's on the New York subway he's on the F train going to Brooklyn for Manhattan

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and he is getting increasingly agitated and angry because he has on his mind this idea that his wife is having an affair with someone else and as he approaches home he gets increasingly

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angry and you know almost uncontrollably so he reaches his walk up he walks up five stories in the summer heat it's the dead of Summer it's July it's 90 degrees

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out 90 humidity he gets upstairs and he looks around thinking where is this guy where is this guy what's going on here uh he rushes out onto the fire escape he looks directly below and he sees this

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young man disheveled young man wiping his brow and he gets the Spurt of angry adrenaline he grabs the nearest heavy object which happens to be a refrigerator and he drops it over the

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edge of the fire escape onto the guy's head and then subsequently dies of a heart attack in the process the scene shifts to heaven there are three men standing before Saint Peter Saint Peter looks down at them and says

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well gentlemen you all know of course why you're here um but we we need to go engage in a bit of a formality you're all in you know it's no problem there but I need to to know how each one of you ended up here guy number one what's your story

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well Saint Peter I thought my wife was stepping out on me I I was getting really really mad it was a hot day in the middle of summer I rushed home I got to my apartment I started looking around for the guy I couldn't find him I rushed out onto the fire escape I saw this guy

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below wiping his brow I got uncontrollably mad I picked up the refrigerator it dropped it on his head and died and sent Peter said okay that's fine you're in okay guy

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number two what's your story uh Saint Peter I don't know you know it's one of those things uh share this apartment with my girlfriend I stepped out on the balcony because it's really hot outside I wiped my brow and all of a sudden this

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refrigerator fell on my head St Peter said okay I understand guy number three what's going on ah Saint Peter uh I don't know I was just sitting in this refrigerator minding my own business

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okay so here's the point to that story and by the way I can't take credit for the story the story is my late late fathers he he loved this story and he loved it in particular as an illustration of the of natural history

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in a way Evolution the idea that you can't see the big picture you can't see what's going on until everything has sort of already happened and then you can piece it together so that is one of

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the tantalizing and engaging as well points about natural history about Evolution it's largely a reconstructive sort of science it's not a benchtop science for the most part you have to sort of reconstruct things and you have

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to look to living animals to get an idea of what was going on in the past so you can link clues about the past that you have a very limited record to the morphology the physiology the behavior of living animals and that's that's an

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important Point here so you'll see how important this is to my thinking as I go on all right so I want to sort of introduce you to sort of The evolutionary sort of

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converge well the the idea of evolutionary convergence the rules of that game so first of all the idea of evolutionary convergence is relatively simple it's the idea that similar environmental conditions can give rise

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to similar biological adaptations and it used to be thought that this was relatively rare back you know way back in the the earliest um point in in in in terms of

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natural selection and Darwin's thinking this was thought to be the case that this was a relatively rare thing it's not believed to be that rare anymore in fact it's not that doesn't seem that rare at all you can find examples of

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this everywhere and you'll see this in a second it also points to a very important idea I think and perhaps a universal idea which is that there are very powerful constraints on animal Form and Function

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that is you can't go you can't go too many paths toward a solution to a particular problem the environment presents okay um focusing eyes are an interesting example of convergent evolution because

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they've appeared not once not twice perhaps not three times but a number of different times in the course of evolution and really almost all in the Cambrian to begin with

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okay another important point now we're at the back end of things so when the eye sees something there's something behind that eye that has to process what the eye sees and that's clusters of

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neurons that's nervous systems that's brains well basically is the great Oliver Sacks once said a neuron is a neuron more or less regardless of species neurons do largely similar sorts

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of things regardless of what animal you may find them in finally familiar brain circuitry now this is a little bit controversial and I don't think everybody has spot this idea

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but the idea is that there are only so many ways that nervous systems can encode different aspects of the world and in particular with regard to what I'm talking about today among other things space and time but I think that

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that's I'm beginning to believe that's pretty much true you can't solve certain problems more than a couple perhaps only one way when it comes to how the nervous system encodes aspects of the world okay

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so I'm giving you the Baseline for what I'm talking about now let's let's just pick an example of convergent evolution so you see here this is a classic example you have

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um the arm or the leg in certain animals the four leg or the arm in the human or the wing of a bird and they're com they consist of all of the same bones more or

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less some bones get lost over the course of time um but essentially you see in in mammals in Birds um you see essentially the same bones

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giving rise to certain kinds of you know to a structure that that is tasked to do a certain function in the case of human beings it might be manipulating the world or Locomotion it depends uh in the

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case of birds in the case of bats it's for flight but if you notice in in the case of the bird and the bat it's different bones that are tests to do different or tasked for different structural

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aspects of of the wing okay so the not the the the wings the the bones the of the finger in the bat serve the purpose of sort of making giving the wing it's

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its overall structure holding the web out in the case of the bird that's not really true birds have feathers um this is a very kind of granular example of convergent evolution

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um the examples the example that I'm going to harp on later of course is the eye and that is you know that is an innovation that appeared in different species quite independently in many

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cases so and in the case of the octopus that's certainly true the octopus relative to vertebrates it's very true so the last common uh ancestor of octopus and human was an eyeless

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basically a sightless worm that didn't even have a central nervous system so all right so moving right along whoops so Cambrian is kind of a sensory

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it's kind of a a a Renaissance of uh sensory richness and it presents the sensory World in three dimensions which introduces certain challenges to animals and in the case of invertebrates you can

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see there was a verb veritable explosion of of invertebrates and in in particular invertebrates with different kinds of eyes so when you're talking about eyes

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obviously and we're talking about Vision we're talking about um the reception of light or aspects of light reflection transmission absorption and scattering so wavelengths of light

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and differentiating those wavelengths um and light has certain physical properties and so these so-called spectral properties of light they result

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in they they yield different types of wavelengths which animals of many animals can discriminate polarized light is or polarized light is

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a is a is another sort of version of this sort of input um and it's invisible to many animals including us but quite visible to to a number of different animals across many

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Genera and the cephalopods are are certainly animals that are capable of perceiving polarized light as well as certain Birds um so light becomes particularly

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important in Cambrian ecology appearance of mobile animals um sort of changes the picture initially and then you have these moving animals that are

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they're they're ambulating around at photic depths what I what I mean by photic depths is steps at which light is sort of meaningful that light penetrates to some to some extent or to a lesser or

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greater extent so basically more less than 50 feet give or take and as soon as animals could sort of see within this this sort of part of the vertical column of water it

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enabled them to exploit far-flung food sources and novel predatory strategies and there was sort of an arms race of innovation so you saw the rise of predator species and prey species

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animals with faster Locomotion animals with armor animals that were able to mimic certain peptides certain small protein components signals that would allow them to somehow deceive or evade

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other animals and a variety of other defenses defenses as well as certain refinements and vision okay so eyes appeared many many times but spatial Acuity at distance I think is

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much more unusual and I think in this case it's relatively important it's particularly important to my argument so light sensing organs aren't really full-blown eyes they're sort of one step on the way toward being an eye

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simple eyes we can point to many examples of simple eyes and simple eyes our our situation in which you have cells that are essentially for the receiving light they can they can pick up light but you have to have some sort

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of pigment that separates each of those cells that allow those cells to sort of come up with some sort of primitive spatial representation of that light so it's almost like an array if you don't

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have the pigment between those those cells that are receiving light that Oregon is not going to be able to do any kind of discrim

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reasonable discrimination certainly not even a course Goods course spatial discrimination except save the idea that if an animal has a spot on left side and a spot on the right side it might be

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able to sort of say roughly well something is moving in the lap to the left Direction something is moving toward the right and I can see that because one eye spot is picking up more

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light than the other and that's about as much as you can do with that kind of an eye um so at this point you get this proliferation of different types of eyes I'm not going to dwell on this there are more

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important things to to talk about soon but you see different kinds of eyes you see the chambered eyes the the the the eyes of a chambered nautilus you see here the eye of an octopus now this the

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the eye of a chambered nautilus is essentially a pinhole there's no lens the eye of an octopus is rather different there's the introduction of a lens and the lens can be moved back and forth some very very similar to that of

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a camera so now you have an animal that can discriminate to some extent near versus far objects and that becomes a theme that you see in other animals of course as well including the vertebrates and then you have the of compound eyes

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now compound eyes can do a lot with space they can sort of represent spatially where something of varying wavelengths is but it's not terrible not necessarily terribly accurate in terms

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of of space it gives you a rough idea depending on the species some are better than others and it may not be good in the case of distance Vision although there may be a little bit of debate about that so here at the top you see an

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animal a jumping spider that has a focusing eye but they have a completely different Motif than other animals with focusing eyes their their pupil is more or less a column that shifts around

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within their eye and when the animal is looking at an object the unsettling thing about looking at a jump jumping spider in the eye or in the eyes is when the jumping spider sees something off

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say to the right you'll see those two columns go and shoot to the right so you can sort of see what they're you can get an idea of what they're looking at then you have the mantis shrimp which has a compound eye but is very capable of

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discriminating huge numbers of different sort of ranges of wavelengths okay so here's a general picture of the different motifs of eyes so you get the idea eyes proliferated explosively

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during the Cambrian so now on the back end a question I've asked myself for a long time is well you have these eyes if you have a focusing eye there's a lot of potential information coming in you have

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to have a nervous system that can do something with that information in other words eyes don't evolve in a vacuum all right eyes you know if a focusing eye appears it stands to reason that there's

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some sort of neural substrate behind that eye that can process all the information that I is bringing in from near scenes from Far scenes Etc

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so you can't have one sort of without the other and so the question I've asked myself is have similar properties underlying sophisticated functions and behaviors in this case a function being

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visual perception immersion nervous systems which are radically different than the nervous systems we find in vertebrates and octopus Vision sort of offers a clue and I think a very good

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opportunity so we've identified analogs of different sort of nervous system structures analogs of the vertebrate of a vertebrate um a vertebrate brain structure in very

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distant animals including some invertebrates in the case of for example the hippocampus which is associated with memory formation retrieving memories

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um we see that there is an area of the honeybee the fruit fly the insect brain meant many insects have something called a mushroom body the mushroom body seems to be doing the sort of similar heavy

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lifting as the vertebrate hippocampus in the case of cephalopods this is a squid brain but you get the idea um there are areas in this case the

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vertical lobe and median Superior frontal lobe which are sort of linked structures in the octopus brain they're sort of higher structures physically in the octopus brain they're they're doing what looks like work that's similar to

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that of the vertebrate hippocampus but they're sort of almost a hybrid they're not just maybe not just hippocampus but also um maybe something like cortical function we're not really sure

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we've identified certain physiological traits in an animal like the octopus that are essentially akin to those we find in vertebrates so this is an experiment

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that was done many years ago David glansman in a review article talked about it but the idea that you could give an octopus a shock from a ball on a lucite stick the animal could be trained

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to avoid that shock to avoid that ball excuse me associating with with the shock well you could actually see in that animal

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you could you could do a uh you could essentially do a recording or in this case you could stimulate um use a stimulating electrode and you could see that that animal was using sort of one of the physiological

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building blocks of memory that we also find in invertebrates this is called long-term potentiation it has to do with a change in the synapses between neurons that facilitates something like memory so we found this

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in the octopus that's a pretty old finding we know that relatively modest nervous systems can do can generate impressive behaviors on the right you see fruit flies fighting over

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essentially a plate of food and the second piece you see uh honeybees watching a waggle dance to sort of get an idea of where food is located out in

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the big wide world and on the third you see a jumping spider sort of Leaping leaping on I believe it was a bee but I my screen is obscured um and the fourth you see a cuttlefish

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exhibiting certain kinds of uh body patterning so these are pretty sophisticated behaviors the this is not nothing to scoff at but these aren't nervous systems that are anywhere near

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as large as the nervous systems of vertebrates okay um so a question that many people have asked for for many many years is

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how much and what sort of a brain is required for conscious experience and and I think that's still very much an open-ended question I could probably get into an argument with Christoph Coke about whether bees are conscious I think

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they might be but I I would have to modify some of my own arguments to sort of accept that but I'm I'm agnostic agnostic perhaps I think that they they could very well be but

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um I'm gonna have to do some digging before I I sort of really conclude that so what about outside the vertebrate lineage um well let's start with the definition of Consciousness that'll that'll put us on

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a better track now I have a sort of a modest definition I think of Consciousness as a stitching together or as many would say particularly in the world of philosophy binding of many closely contemporaneous sensory threads

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that is sensory input that's coming in perhaps from some from different channels or from different sub modal aspects of of an organ like the eye and it's coming in simult more or less simultaneously or closely spaced in time

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and the Brain the nervous system is somehow stitching those different threads into a coherent unified scene and the animal perceives it as such as a coherent unified scene that scene is

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also that scene also in my mind has to persist in memory that is there somehow has to be a link between perception and memory in order for Consciousness to

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arise that is a super important bit of of the nervous system that has to have Arisen in order to facilitate conscious experience so conscious states are bound scenes that offer content which is

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correlated in time okay beyond that that you might get from segregated sensory inputs just imagine an animal getting you know hearing a sound on the one hand and seeing

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something on the other hand but not necessarily having any kind of connectivity neurally speaking between those those things um so sensory inputs don't in animals that are

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conscious don't remain segregated for long okay so this suggests that there are a surprising number of non-human animals that are capable of subjective experience all right so let's lay out some basic

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criteria for Consciousness I think across the board you have to have and this is based on on observations invertebrates in particular in mammals and humans specifically because humans can give us a form of accurate report as to what they're

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experiencing so you have to have brain regions that function like Thalamus and cortex what do I mean by that well the thalamus is sort of a sensory relay that brings in senses uh in the case of the

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mammals brings in the various senses except for the most part for smell smell is a very interesting sense because it essentially all but avoids the thalamus but all the other senses come in through

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the thalamus and they hit the cortex and there is a recurrent connection between Thalamus and cortex cortex being in the area where you where you keep your stuff okay if you're if you're a mammal

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um or if you're a bird because birds have essentially homologs of Cortex and perhaps other other vertebrates as well so you have to have some sort of

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connection between the thalamus and the cortex going on and that is sort of part of that link that I talked about between perception and memory the cortex is where essentially memory is much of

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memory is stored Thalamus is what allows the sensory world to connect to the cortex and then there is some sort of you know recurrent signaling going on

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between those two you have to have Dynamic brain activity in my mind I think we're going to find that a lot of animals even perhaps certain invertebrates have Dynamic brain activity that is the pattern of firing

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neurons across certain brain areas that resembles what we can observe during the human conscious State okay I don't believe that there are nine ways to skin that cat I think we're going to find

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similar motifs the more we look but we're in a very early period uh in terms of sort of proving that finally the ability to make sophisticated discriminations and those sophisticated

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discriminations a lot of them have um they're they're essentially connected to the idea of this deep reciprocal connection connection between perception and memory without that connection you

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can't make such discriminations the interesting thing about this observation or this this notion is that there's a lot behaviorally that you can observe in non-human animals without them

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necessarily even giving you a report that suggests that they're actually doing this very thing that they're making sophisticated discriminations okay all right so let's move on to the

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building blocks of Consciousness I believe and this is just me you know I'm not necessarily in the minority but I may be I think Consciousness is contention on what I would call fast sensory channels I think a vision is a

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quote fast unquote sensory Channel because it it is coming in very very quickly and light itself um essentially travels of course travels

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very very quickly I'll contrast for this for example with smell now many animals are capable of producing sort of um a very sophisticated 3D

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um sort of model of the world based on smell but it's very very coarse and of course as you know smell is really interesting it dissipates over greater distances light can penetrate faster and

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farther um smell takes a little while it's not necessarily instantaneous although as soon as you know as soon as particles of of a particular odor it hit your hit your nose yeah you're going to perceive

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something but putting together putting all that together in a fast sort of way it's it's not it's not um giving you the kind of sort of Rich tapestry that that Vision gives you immediately and I say

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immediately on purpose because it is a rich tapestry particularly for some animals that are quite olfactorily talented but in terms of speed it's not at all like Vision you have to have a

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density of sensory inputs in the case of I that's clearly the case in many animals there's a huge number of inputs from um from receptors coming in from

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photoreceptors Big bundles of of input coming in from photoreceptors um so a richness in terms of what's coming in you know in terms of all of the possible inputs and then you have to

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kind of integrate these sensory signals relatively quickly okay um and that you might say is sort of the

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key element of perceptual unity and then finally that connection to memory you have to have some kind of working memory for there to be conscious awareness and that again Harkens to to behavioral

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obser observations of behavior in different animals we can glean a lot from what we observe animals doing how animals behave we can glean a lot about working memory

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and now finally that old thing that thing that I harped on before brain circuitry that links perception and memory okay so those are my building blocks so we want to explore Consciousness and firefling species we've asked the

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question what is consciousness I've given you my definition we it raises some practical questions what brain structures and functions are necessary for Consciousness I told you that one structure found in mammals the thalamus

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is an important structure to look we should look for analogs of that because it's an important relay that has recursive connectivity to Cortex in in mammals which is where memories are

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stored we should look for similar sort of suborgans of the nervous system in in non-human animals in invertebrates in this case um and then we can start sort of mapping

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the neurobiology the neurophysiology of putative Consciousness awareness conscious awareness in in invertebrates well how do we study this well we take strains of evidence from Behavior we

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take strains of evidence from physiology was a very relatively new thing among invertebrates we we've only recently developed the tools to look at at this sort of physiology in any degree of

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resolution in the invertebrates which animal should we study that gets us to the octopus I think the octopus is a good candidate because it has very sophisticated faculties we know it's learning and it's

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quite capable learning and memory wise and Its Behavior certainly indicate uh a richness for these these sorts of faculties um they have complex nervous systems

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that can support the above very important we need to come up with a systematic approach uh as of late I haven't been able to do this very well because I well I've built four labs in the past 10 years I haven't been

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attached to all four Labs I've been I'm attached to one Lab at Dartmouth but that's that's a long story one thing we could do is we could start to to map the octopus visual system in Earnest something that hasn't really

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been done in any systematic way yet and map out or work out the neurophysiology and visual perception and memory of an animal like the octopus well I have this hypothesis which you'll see

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in a second um there are certain pitfalls vis-a-vis making parsimonious conclusions about how Evolution unfolded and how we got to where we are in terms of brain and

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behavior generally and in terms of Consciousness in particular I tried to I don't believe that parsimony is always the case um in terms of evolution we don't have to go into that too much I do believe

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that there are constraints on certain kinds of network properties so if you look at complex nervous systems do the same general principles apply to all of those nervous systems and I think at a certain level

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we'll probably find out that they do and again that goes back to Oliver Sax's old saw a neuron is a neuron is a neuron so here we are functional anatomy of Consciousness we see this connection between cortex and Thalamus and what I

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didn't mention basal ganglia in the case of a mammal like a human we see similar structures essentially at this point homologous structures I think we can safely say that there's homology between

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the telencephalon and the cortex the thalamus and the basal ganglia are exist in birds and then we get two cephalopods and it's kind of still a black box all right so let's get into octopus I think it's a good candidate

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for testing the boundaries of Consciousness over the course of evolution it has a sophisticated nervous system although it's less complex of course than the vertebrate case it's got functionally convergent properties I

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mentioned long-term potentiation which is an aspect of physiology you found it find in the vertebrates where you find it in octopus too you find it in a lot of animals you find it in insects as well uh learning and memory quite

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comparable to mammals and birds diverse behaviors across species so you see in different species of cephalopods and different species of octopus you see different kinds of behaviors and those may be driven by possible differences in

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properties neural properties driven by certain environment certain needs set up by environment by environmental context behavioral flexibility that re Rivals

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some some higher vertebrates I think that's largely true for the octopus so here are the brains of a human of a zebra finch familiar structures again as I said a lot of homology

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you get down to the cephalopods and while we started to map certain of these areas particularly these high areas like the vertical lobe and the median Superior frontal lobe and certain other areas associated with

00:36:34

well with control link the chromatophores system with controlling movement we've done a little bit of sort of mapping of this nervous system but a lot of it is still sort of in Black's Black Box territory

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okay so for probably around 20 years or so nearly 20 years people have been able to record brain activity in in Behaving

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octopuses it hasn't been it's been very coarse relative to sort of the the vertebrate case um we're still very early on in this one of the earliest examples is work that

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was done by Graziano firito and Benjamin hockner among others where they sunk single electrodes into different parts of the octopus brain and over the course of uh months probably many months and

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many animals they managed to sort of map out or map structure or map air brain area to certain function and they does this both for um

00:37:37

sensory and for motor and so this was an important technique now in fact as of a month ago I believe well actually less more recent than that actually this month um a group

00:37:52

um a group uh in in representing various countries uh Tamara gutnik Mickey Cuba and their colleagues were able for the first time to develop

00:38:04

a technique to implant um electrodes without a tether now that previous example that you saw required that the animal be physically linked by a wire to a pre-amplifier to some sort

00:38:17

of recording device to record uh the signatures of of brain cells well that's all well and good except that eventually the animal more often than not the animal find the wire and rip it out of its head or whipped out of its mantle

00:38:30

and rip a part of its brain out as well that's a big problem in the case of this you don't have that issue anymore so this is a sort of a big technological jump they they put they essentially they

00:38:41

put the the hardware most of the hardware of of this setup into a waterproof bag they surgically implanted in an anesthetized animal the animal was

00:38:54

revived and they could at least get a start at associating certain kinds of behaviors of the animal in time with certain neural signatures so certain patterns of firing in the

00:39:08

nervous system now this is a technical tour de force but there's still a long way to go they haven't they weren't abled by their own admission to really document sort of

00:39:22

specific behaviors in or specific neural signatures to specific kinds of behavior although they saw similar sorts of neural signatures as

00:39:34

are found in in other animals including the vertebrates so it's a big leap forward but it's very very largely Technical and we have a ways to go but this is a very very important first step now

00:39:47

a group that I've involved been involved with is is very interested in this topic we published a review article some time ago a little more than a year ago I guess and we we basically try to put together

00:40:01

a lot of the evidentiary strains that would suggest Consciousness in a cephalopod like the octopus so again as I said before impressive discriminatory and anticipatory behavior

00:40:14

um cephalopods are clearly big brain invertebrates that are confronting very variable sorts of environments variable in space and in time

00:40:24

we've started to identify certain neural substrates in terms of of their function we've done this for a while but we really haven't been able we really haven't been able to do this in any

00:40:37

great systematic way yet for for any cephalopods although I think we'll be getting a start quite soon um early thinkers early researchers like Jay-Z young really Stu actually start he

00:40:51

thought of the cephalopod brain as as a sort of a a good model um for nervous systems generally which is quite an interesting take back in the day um but it sort of prompts us to sort of

00:41:05

really really consider the idea of Consciousness in in a far-flung species like the octopus um I think uh we're starting to see

00:41:16

neurophysiological Dynamics um that are quite interesting um we're starting to observe certain behavioral States like sleep which may give us the opportunity to identify

00:41:29

signature brain waves in the octopus signature um sort of waveforms that resemble the vertebrate case um we haven't we don't have much to go on here yet but I think that that's an

00:41:44

important sort of Waypoint that we have to kind of get to all right so let's talk about Vision in the octopus so if you look at the human eye and the octopus eye

00:41:55

there's a lot of convergence here you can see very similar sorts of structures these are both focusing eyes one distinction is humans use ciliary Muscle to sort of

00:42:08

deform the lens to focus we don't really pop our lenses in and out front to back um like a camera to see objects that are further away or closer to us we don't

00:42:21

accommodate doing that we distort the lens to accommodate octopuses don't do that octopuses actually move their eye move their lens in and out more like a camera it's actually a true camera eye

00:42:32

in that sense okay so but there's a lot of convergence functional convergence of course but structural convergence too and again independent appearance and evolution these did not evolve from a

00:42:45

node an a single ancestral animal that had an eye they evolved both from an animal that was eyeless and essentially did not have a central nervous system that was their last common ancestor so

00:42:58

here's just an example I I want you to sort of focus more on the right if you look at the retina of a mammal light when it passes through the retina it actually goes to go

00:43:10

through some all kinds of intermediate processing cells before it hits the receptor and the weird thing about the mammalian eye the vertebrate eye generally is we have a hole in the middle of our eye and the in the the the

00:43:24

the receptors the axons coming from The receptors are actually they're sort of aimed outward and they have to make a turn and go back in through that hole into the brain after pass and and the

00:43:35

signal again has passed through many layers of or layers of of many cells when you look at the octopus there is no such sort of processing layer in their eye light goes directly

00:43:47

to the photoreceptor and then at the back end there's something going on in What's called the optic lobe directly behind the retina the retinas here the optic Globe the optic Globe is is behind it on

00:43:59

the left side you see it here and what's really interesting is it looks for the world structurally as if the all the retinal processing cells all the processing that goes on the retina

00:44:11

has been back loaded into the optic lobe of the octopus so the retina is just simply a simple sheet of photoreceptors the processing is happening in the optic lobe but the structure of the cells that process it the way they're wired

00:44:25

together is really sort of reminiscent of what you see in the retina of of the eye of a typical vertebrate and so you see on the right of some colleagues and

00:44:38

I did sort of a fly through we did a reconstrating reconstruction and you're sort of seeing cells and sort of aspects of connectivity as we fly through different depths in the octopus optic

00:44:50

lobe so if we look at the functional aspect of the eye well the octopus does very well in terms of Acuity it does really really well look at where it it falls

00:45:02

in terms of of Acuity and these are all done the Acuity is relative to height in this case Body height but basically you see the octopuses is between the human

00:45:14

and certain Birds but it's quite well placed Falcons do exceeding loyal of course not surprisingly but octopuses do awfully well for an invertebrate they can see far away they can see close up

00:45:26

they can accommodate so the eye presents us with this sort of familiar structure and function um I believe again ice don't evolve in vacuum it's suggestive of critical

00:45:39

memory and integration substrates behind that eye in the in the brain in the central brain of the animal um and I think it's a sensory portal that allows us the opportunity to investigate higher brain function and at

00:45:53

some point ultimately the signatures for visual perception and then perhaps eventually later we can we can link this to um how vision is linked to memory how

00:46:07

visual perception is linked to memory but that's a waste down the road okay so when you look at certain features of um how vision is processed in the vertebrate

00:46:20

you see certain themes that come up again and again you see a so-called retina topic organization of of of that part of the brain that is doing an aspect of visual processing in the

00:46:32

cortex in this case and so there what this simply says is there's a preservation spatially in terms of what cells are being stimulated by incoming

00:46:45

signal there's there's a preservation of the sensory relationships from the outside so photoreceptor here photoreceptor there somehow that spatial relationship is preserved in the brain it's represented

00:47:00

in some sort of a in a spatial sense in the brain okay in the vertebrate visual system there's a hierarchical representation which is to say that the signal comes in through the thalamus or

00:47:13

the lateral geniculate and it's decomposed into a variety of different submodal properties like motion like differential wavelengths uh textures uh

00:47:27

any number of different things light and Shadow it's deconstructed and then reconstructed but there's a very hierarchical representation in the visual system as you get in deeper there

00:47:39

are higher processing centers that sort of start perhaps pulling things together but again very hierarchical and then as I said before there are all kinds of recurrent

00:47:52

Pathways I talked about recurrent or re-entrant Pathways between Thalamus the sensory relay and the cortex where you keep your memory where you keep your stuff um but you can see these kinds of reentrant Pathways envisioned between

00:48:04

say prefrontal cortex and visual cortex and so you have sort of a feedback stream and a feed forward stream in the case of vision and these are are re-entrant this is a constant theme in

00:48:17

vertebrate brains is it a theme in the cephalopod brain well we really can't say that for sure now getting back to behavior there are certain kinds of Behavioral tasks you can set forth for

00:48:31

the animal to to perform that for the world for all the world indicate to me the animal has some sort of working memory so in this case I'm going to show you a movie that was taken

00:48:45

um in grazio to free with those laboratory at stacion zoologica in Naples and it shows you the aftermath of an experiment involving uh what some people call observational learning what

00:48:57

other people's social learning so the idea is one octopus has learned how to solve this box this box is a transparent lucite box that has three possible entry

00:49:08

points inside and inside there is a living crab or a living shrimp and the octopus can clearly see the living shrimp from the outside but it has to figure out which entry point will

00:49:20

actually work so at the same time that this animal has learned this task once the animal has learned the task you show another animal the first animal performing the task

00:49:34

once that first animal has learned the task you open up a window so that another animal in an adjoining tank can actually see the first animal solving the task ah that this animal goes to you

00:49:47

know portal on the portal on the left to get in to grab the crab so what you're going to see here is an animal that has actually observed another animal who's learned this and an effect no trial

00:50:00

learning this animal goes right to the portal that will allow him and the other portals won't won't work so I'm gonna put this up and I'm gonna speed it up a little just so you see if you look on the right hand side lower right hand

00:50:13

corner you'll see the octopus and watch his eye and watches he gets more and more interested he comes over um he looks briefly but then he goes right

00:50:24

to this entry point and if you watch his web you'll see that he struggles a little bit he twists it a bit and then opens it up and as soon as he opens it up that poor crab is history so there he's just

00:50:39

gotten it open he reaches in he grabs the crab okay that in my mind necessarily has to involve some form of working memory it sort of seems obvious to me that has

00:50:52

that has to be the case well that's really important because I would suggest that working memory is something that you so you see in conscious animals I'm not sure you can make an argument that

00:51:04

there can be uh working memory in an animal that isn't you know capable of some form of awareness okay so in the lab we can expose the animal

00:51:16

to different kinds of of stimuli and in order to to sort of you know perform these experiments to create these experiments to to build them you can expose them to Natural

00:51:28

stimuli the obvious ones are prey since they're predatory on animals like crab and shrimp and certain vertebrate fish you can have artificial stimuli it can be anything from a white bowl that the

00:51:41

animal has learned to associate with food um it can be the human being who might feed that animal on the other side you have negative stimuli it might be in the wild Amore eel uh in the laboratory it

00:51:55

might be a red ball which the animal has come to associate with a shock okay so we have sort of a tool kit to sort of explore these sorts of things and I I don't want to naysay at all the

00:52:07

importance of observing behavior and and developing a suite of Behavioral experiments to test to probe for conscious experience in in cephalopods people like Jennifer Mather have have done really really fine work in terms of

00:52:21

observing both in the wild and in in a lab or controlled setting what animals are actually doing how they're behaving and a lot of their work actually points to the existence of working memory and I would say by extension

00:52:34

conscious awareness at certain points so this is just a simple video showing you can do some really interesting psychophysical experiments based on presenting a visual stimulus so in this

00:52:48

case I've put this is in Graziano firito's laboratory I have a camera in this tank it's hidden in a in a brick you can see the little hole that was made in the brick I had to do this because I put the camera in by itself

00:53:01

the octopus tore it apart they would constantly do this so I hit it in a brick it's part of the octopus's Den he doesn't see the cameras there and if you watch I'm projecting using a a a

00:53:12

projector back behind all of this I'm projecting an image of an extension of his tank and you'll see what happens when a crab appears in that video the octopus is

00:53:26

seeing and we simply wanted to say so check is the octopus aware of something that's Salient in this video because it's an important building block for experimentation there's the crab running across and you'll see the animal looks

00:53:39

he goes in a tries to attack it okay and then watch what he does afterwards he pulls back he didn't succeed clearly and he's clearly looking again and he wants to engage again and he's going to do the same thing again at that point where he

00:53:52

sees the crab well that seems sort of humble but it's really really important to do these kinds of little sort of trial runs to make sure that what you're presenting the animal with in a laboratory is garnering you know Salient

00:54:07

responses so I'm just showing this as a building block now one experiment we did in my lab quite a while ago was we applied we we built essentially an invertebrate equivalent of the Mars

00:54:20

water maze Mars water maze is an interesting or not well it's it's it's an interesting sort of task because it involves um it's not actually this excuse me sorry I misspoke not Morris Barnes maze

00:54:34

the Barnes mace was developed to look at navigation and navigation related memory in vertebrates like mice and rats and so the idea is there there are numerous sort of fake

00:54:48

holes uh but there's only real one real hole which will actually lead the octopus into its native water and it can't see in this case the octopus can't see

00:55:00

you really can't see the holes because its eyes are oriented upward this is a terrestrial maze the octopus is out of water at this point you can see him being pulled out of a little you know blind and he's wandering around and of

00:55:15

course he's using touch but he also will see there are landmarks which are not visible on here there are landmarks on the side of this maze there's a plus sign there might be a square and another

00:55:29

location well the plus sign happens to be over the one real hole so the interesting thing is when the ocarus finally learns where the real hole is he goes to the plus sign he Dives in and hits his native water well if you rotate

00:55:42

the maze so that the hole is no longer the real hole is no longer above or below the plus sign it's just a fake hole that won't lead him anywhere he doesn't go to the real hole anymore he goes to where he saw that plus sign

00:55:54

above what he thought was the real hole and he tries to get into that hole even though he can't make it so you'll you'll see that in practice over here um so here's the octopus and I'm going to kind of mute this and

00:56:08

describe what's going on because I think it's a little distracting okay let me turn this down so you see the animal again exploring and you see

00:56:25

those landmarks right you see the triangle and you see that plus sign the plus sign happens to be over water and of course being in this kind of environment it's very light it's very bright and it's out of the water it's not a great environment for octopus over

00:56:38

the long term octopuses don't want to hang out in this kind of environment for another length of time so there's a lot of impetus for that octopus to get out of there get back to its native tank so when we shift that maze now he finds his

00:56:51

way in there now when you rotate that that side wall so that the plus sign is over another hole not a real hole the

00:57:03

octopus goes to where the plus sign is he doesn't go to where the real hole was he goes to the plus sign that indicates that he's now Associated that plus sign with Escape it's kind of interesting and and we've

00:57:16

done this a number of times it works it works pretty well we still have to do this in a really systematic way but you kind of get the idea so that speaks a lot to

00:57:29

to memory among other things to to to working memory in particular um and so now I'm going to kind of end things because I think we really have to have some sort of discussion so I want

00:57:42

to give you sort of my thumbnail sketch of the natural history of um of Consciousness and and I'll point to certain Innovations so basically I observe that animals with focusing eyes

00:57:55

lies with lenses that are of a single compartment not not you know omitidia not uh the multi-compartmented eyes of of other invertebrates but true focusing lens single compartment eyes camera eyes

00:58:10

in the case of the octopus they seem to exhibit more flexible behaviors than other members of their phyla generally speaking um distance vision is possible in these

00:58:22

animals via focusing camera eyes so arguably if we're talking about the back end how these animals process what they're seeing they have the luxury of time now time becomes very important in terms of

00:58:35

encoding this aspect in the nervous system because now if the animal can see stuff from far away let's say the animal sees a predator from far away maybe the Predator hasn't seen him yet he's 150

00:58:47

feet 200 feet away the Predator hasn't seen him but the octopus sees the animal he's not going to react quickly instantly perhaps reflexively as some people might say so arguably there's

00:59:00

time now to plan to monitor the situation to monitor the environment and act on Salient events or objects within this detailed scene that the animal now is privy to with his focusing eye that

00:59:13

gives him the capability of distance Vision um distance Vision necessarily evolved with brain circuitry for monitoring and predicting I think I excuse the expression I think that's a no-brainer

00:59:26

um you know I think that that must have been the case it I think distance Vision paved the way for the elaboration of new kinds of memories we talked about working memory eventually we can talk about episodic

00:59:38

memory because now we're talking about rich visual scenes and you have to sort of you know you have to sort of think that it's it doesn't make much sense for the animal to have this sophisticated

00:59:51

um perceptual capacity without the ability to store all that detail over over sort of longer stretches um and now um we can say that animals equipped so

01:00:06

equipped we're able to construct detailed visual scenes they had various submodal properties when they say submodal properties in the case of the eye I'm talking about textures Contours intensities wavelengths

01:00:18

mapping these kinds of properties led to the development of certain kinds of specialized brain architecture and the means of integrating aspects of that architecture okay so that is part and

01:00:30

parcel of the link that I'm proposing between perception and memory but it's also links within structures that are functioning like cortex so links between areas that are resem that are

01:00:43

essentially memorializing different aspects of the world from different senses so that's higher order mapping it's arguably Dynamic which is to say that there is signaling going on all the

01:00:55

time it's not just simply sitting there stationary like a computer memory now The Binding of unitary visual scene and the appearance of these new kinds of memories and the and the emergence of the the

01:01:07

re-entrant or recurrent circuits that connect perception and memory I believe are essentially the cynical none of early sensory Consciousness and

01:01:20

with that I'm gonna end my talk I have a lot of people to thank I'm sorry I went over um I hope there's time for some questions um I really appreciate your time thank you very much

01:01:33

mistake it's obvious why octopus is so so popular in our audience everybody muted uh yes can you hear yeah perfect if you stop sharing okay

01:01:48

very exciting thank you very much for this this talk David can you hear me yes now I can hear you fantastic um yes it's obvious why they're so popular because I think it's fascinating we just have so much content in you know

01:02:01

what 45 minutes one hour so absolutely fantastic I'm sure there are some questions to kick off a discussion who who would like to begin do we have any anything anybody would like to discuss straight up with David

01:02:15

about the talk any discussion topics questions we did have some excuse me oh go ahead yes I have um a topic related question well I mean was it quite a lot of information

01:02:32

in the short time so I'm wondering where can I access the recording of this session yes we will put it onto the YouTube and you'll be able to re-watch that so it goes on to our YouTube channel and we'll do that

01:02:44

um within the week what kind of YouTube channel I can share it in the chat for you okay thank you very much no problem Diana yeah hi David thanks for a brilliant talk that was so much

01:02:58

information and fabulous um I had a couple quick questions I just wanted to check two uh things so when you're talking about working memory um are you distinguishing between working memory and long-term memory for

01:03:12

example when we talk about working memory in humans we're talking about what we're using work working as you know short-term memory now called working memory and then that gets trans some of that gets transferred into

01:03:24

long-term memory right it seems from your exp the experiments you showed you have an animal with the I'll give you a specifically um when the animal when the octopus was watching the other octopus uh coming in

01:03:38

from the left to obtain that crab was that done right before he was shown it or was there evidence for long-term memory as well where he's retaining it over time I was curious about that so in

01:03:51

the case of those experiments um the actual presentation of the you know octopus a who's sort of the trainee animal the animal who's been trained on the um you know with trials uh trained

01:04:03

on that task the presentation of that animal who's already learned it to another animal who's watching um you know that is you know these are these are things that happen really sort

01:04:18

of really quickly um so you you show him that animal solving the problem and then you very quickly give him his own box you drop a box like that I should have explained that I'm sorry your box like

01:04:31

that into into the new animals tank and instantly goes to the right portal to get the crab out um here's the the Intriguing part now and I'll get lambasted by a lot of

01:04:44

people for for for this but when they when people talk about memory in regard to Consciousness they're they're quite they they think of memory in a very very unitary sort of way I mean I'm not saying that they don't distinguish

01:04:56

between working and episodic or long-term memory there is a distinction and I think episodic memory figures into what octopuses do too um I think both are going on in different contexts but when people like

01:05:09

well for example Christoph Coke years ago wrote a paper with Julio tanoni where they they essentially they kind of all but disregarded memory they shunted it aside and I thought to myself hey guys you know once a nervous system

01:05:22

represents something if that representation persists for more than it for like a second for four seconds for a minute it's memory that is memory because the animal can revisit it even if it has to

01:05:35

happen in short order it can be Revisited that's a form of memory and I do not believe and again there are some people who may you know crawl down my throat for this I don't believe you can segregate Consciousness and memory writ

01:05:48

large all of memory but yeah there is a distinction in your very right and I should have uh you know made that distinction um but good point I mean but it's it's still fascinating to be able to see

01:06:01

observational learning and the use in that time frame I'm not saying I I think that oh yeah these are really important experiments it's interesting to find out if you delay that slightly and you know

01:06:13

like if you do the late match to sample how long might they retain that you know it's it's really curious does it get encoded into long-term memory that would seem like a natural experiment even delaying it you know 15 seconds and then

01:06:26

go 20 you could do those incremental measurements absolutely you're warming the cockles of the late Mortimer Michigan's heart that is absolutely critical and I I would love to see somebody do a systematic series of

01:06:39

delayed match to sample or delayed non-match to sample I mean a whole Suite of those would be really informative in the octopus um thank you thank you David sure

01:06:51

we have two other questions in the row I think h yes yeah yeah that's me yeah thank you very much thank you all right excellent talk

01:07:06

I really enjoyed it uh thank you very much for that thank you I do worry a little bit about what you know Chalmers calls of course the hard problem which is we don't seem to really know as yet what

01:07:20

the neural basis is for awareness or sentience we can talk about correlates of course yes but given that we don't actually know what the actual neural basis for

01:07:35

awareness pure awareness is how safe are we in talking about cutoffs in terms of who has it and who doesn't have it so I I really appreciate your your your

01:07:49

um advancing ideas about how it evolves or how it evolved it makes a lot of sense to me there are a lot of ideas obviously about the evolution of Consciousness but now in terms of who

01:08:02

hasn't who doesn't it seems to me that's a trickier question once if if we don't really understand the essential basis of awareness itself what is your thinking about that I think I think I I largely

01:08:15

agree with you uh I think there is a big problem here and part of the problem has to do with the fact that you know like essentially all sort of physiological brain properties it's it's a it's a dynamic property or dynamic series of

01:08:28

properties and therefore you know we're not really privy to any kind of detailed sort of picture of all of that unfolding right so that

01:08:42

gets to sort of technical limitations technological limitations if we talk about sort of state-of-the-art brain Imaging what are we talking about in the case of humans we're talking about fmri right

01:08:53

um well fmri has very distinct spatial and temporal limitations it can only tell you so much and it is not a direct recording of nerve cell activity it's recording of the metabolism required

01:09:06

changes in metabolism required for Hungry nerve nerve cells right hungry neurons so arguably the neurons that are most active are going to be the neurons that are most hungry and therefore you're going to see you know oxygen

01:09:19

glucose levels elevated in those particular regions where neurons are sort of most responsive so that's your picture from fmri it's not bad but it's not giving us a real take and temporarily it's not great because of

01:09:32

course it takes probably just shy of a second to reconstruct for example a slice of human brain in an MRI scanner and that second is sort of a universe of

01:09:44

potential activity that that sort of Falls you know between the cracks it doesn't get picked up so we're not at a point where we can really pick this stuff up so I agree with you and I think there is an important caveat here that

01:09:58

we haven't really picked up we've picked up certain physiological signatures which are which are contemporaneous with conscious experience in the human case at least and we've correlated them with accurate verbal report which is great

01:10:12

but as you said we don't have a good feel sort of structurally or across sort of the functional architecture of brains for what is actually what Consciousness

01:10:25

actually is at at the level of you know sort of the the physiological picture you know we we don't know what's quite what's going on there so yeah it's an important caveat and I you know I'm

01:10:38

always mindful of it um you know but um I'm going on the idea when I look at cephalopods I'm going on the idea that if we identify certain other sort of strains of evidence

01:10:51

the more strains of evidence that we have the better so we can we can build an argument based on a lot of the behavioral aspects what we observe behaviorally we can build that argument

01:11:03

also on strands of evidence um coming from physiology like do we see physiological signatures that are reminiscent of you know sort of different different frequencies of of

01:11:16

brain activity in the case of the vertebrates do we see something similar in the octopus um you know so I I do agree with you there is an important caveat here and that is the limits of sort of what we what we

01:11:28

can see and do right now um so yeah I'm very mindful of it thank you thank you sure thanks for the question we have Elliot in our next question hi Elliot hi Dave

01:11:42

nice to see you again I was privileged enough to work with Dave on the Barnes maze this is uh way back when yeah but my question is uh I'm not sure if you've read it but there's an article in the

01:11:54

Journal of experimental biology of molluscan vision uh in the strawberry clock where it has a similar uh camera eye yeah I wonder what the obstacles would

01:12:07

be to uh looking at the brain structure of a shelled mollusk versus a cephalopod yikes yeah uh I I think there are sort

01:12:21

of major ex constraints based on how invasive you would have to get right um you know for example yeah well you could argue that you could sort of drill through shells you could you could do any number of things but that is

01:12:33

predicated an idea that you can sort of map the structures behind that hard surface right and know where you're headed um very very tough I mean probably somebody's going to do something like

01:12:46

that along those lines eventually but it's very very tough uh at this point I think methodologically to to pull that off right now so I mean be very informative right because you'd want you

01:12:58

know if you're looking across phylogeny you certainly want other comparators you want you want to look across species to sort of see whether certain presumptions that you made regarding the octopus versus say vertebrates are kind of in

01:13:11

line with some sort of a larger evolutionary picture so good question I I don't know where we can go at this point but I think it would be fruitful if somebody could figure out a way to do it but it would be really really invasive and a lot of trial and a lot of

01:13:24

error I think unfortunately oh and one thing I didn't mention sort of off the subject I should have mentioned it very very recently something very interesting happened there was a pre-print put up by Judith

01:13:38

punger and uh her colleagues that um that suggests the existence of sort of Center surround visual fields in the in the octopus brain

01:13:52

that's extraordinary in the sense that that is the first indication of any any uh to any degree that they're doing what I described before they're doing they're they're mapping visual space in a way

01:14:06

that's sort of similar to how vertebrate brains map visual space that they're preserving the space um you know that comes in from the input somehow in in a part of the brain

01:14:19

there's spatial there's topograph there's essentially topographic mapping there's a topographical representation of what's on the outside on the inside that's really intriguing and I'm very gratified to hear that I had an argument

01:14:32

with somebody many years ago who made a strong claim that in fact there wasn't any kind of topographical representation in the octopus brain at all um but here we are I think we think we have

01:14:44

evidence for that next question I'm I don't have your name I only have only have a device so I have gigaset gx290 or maybe this is your name I'm

01:14:58

assuming things awesome I don't hear you though oh I'm so sorry I didn't I didn't check I didn't check it's not a problem now we're here go ahead no you hear me

01:15:12

okay good evening uh Jonas is my name um thank you thank you David so much for your talk it was absolutely amazing and inspiring um

01:15:25

have you heard of um David's Pena Guzman um he he wrote a book about dreaming animals he took in

01:15:38

um a philosophical approach but that was um there was pretty pretty amazing I think because um dreaming and you you were talking

01:15:52

about representation in animals and that would be a um cast to Consciousness and um David pinegar's mom said that

01:16:04

dreaming might as well be a strong indicator for Consciousness so do you know anything about dreaming and and uh I know that we've we've we've had

01:16:16

some degree of sort of Behavioral evidence for something that looks like looks like it might be dreaming um you see something like a a sort of a form of a rem state in octopus right so

01:16:30

rapid AI movement in the vertebrates but you see something like that in octopus that have very high thresholds of arousal right so there there are higher thresholds so they're clearly sleeping but something else is going on because

01:16:42

you'll see sort of weird body patterning occurring in these animals their chromatophores are expanding and Contracting they're exhibiting these weird patterns during their sleep and people have interpreted this as dreaming

01:16:56

we don't have you know sort of super firm evidence of of of that yet um I think dreaming is is really really an interesting aspect of of brain function and and some people have

01:17:08

suggested and I think I'm in line with this that that dreaming dream states are essential actually a form of there they're a form of conscious awareness but the difference is

01:17:20

you know in the case of the mammal the cortex is talking to Itself by and large it's no longer talking across that reentrant link to Thalamus right so the sensory world isn't really coming in

01:17:32

essentially the brain is sort of involuting and so aspects of the cortex are reentrantly connected the recurrent connected recurrently and they they're they're actually doing something but

01:17:44

it's something on the inside with no recourse to the outside world so it's the brain sort of talking to itself it's the brain being sort of aware of stuff coming up from the the memory reliquaries of of the cortex so a

01:17:57

lot of people would argue that Consciousness is simply a different uh excuse me REM sleep is a a variety of Consciousness and I don't think I disagree with that so that's about the extent of it for me I wish I

01:18:09

knew a little bit more but it's a great area so thanks Jonas I'm I'm conscious of time so we're going to start going quickly through to yeah um questions of Carol if you wanted to

01:18:22

ask your question hi Carl yeah um I'm not sure I can even get the question out straight but I'm fascinated and the reference to chromatophores and dreaming is is kind of Apt here because from what I've read

01:18:35

um octopuses don't have the capacity like the visual capacity to even see color and yet they've got the capacity to match up those chromatophores to the environment and the color and to me that begs the question of what you mean by

01:18:48

Consciousness because in some sense that animal is conscious is responding is you know has the plasticity to respond to the environment at that point but you know the idea that it has any even the

01:19:01

visual response or the awareness that it's doing that like it I don't know how I mean I mean this is a much broader question but you know I'm just curious about how you think about it okay you know that issue of awareness

01:19:13

Consciousness and and and sensory input perception the whole right right well well let's just just keep in mind I mean I'll just put this out there um keep in mind that even though octopuses have more or less as far as we

01:19:27

know in their eyes they have more or less one flavor of photoreceptor right they're they're sort of sensitive to the blue range of of they're producing their their brain is building a complex picture of a visual scene it doesn't

01:19:40

need it doesn't need the representation of what we call color of wavelength wavelength differentials to necessarily come up with a complex picture of the world both from near and from far away so that's sort of a

01:19:54

separate thing you're talking about sort of a richer maybe a richer variety of Consciousness with perhaps true color vision but you bring up an interesting point which is the mystery of color

01:20:05

matching in octopuses the idea that they only have this more or less one flavor of photoreceptor they also they're also evidence that they they have some expression of this photoreceptor on their skin which is sort of interesting a sort of a photoreceptor on their skin

01:20:19

so they may be picking up information from that we don't completely understand it um the idea of color matching is still quite mysterious some people have associated with um the fact that

01:20:31

octopuses also have polarizing Vision so they can see polarized light and maybe some and I don't I don't necessarily buy that I don't completely understand polarizing Vision myself but I don't necessarily buy it but some people have

01:20:43

suggested maybe they're making discriminations in a polarized light channel that are allowing sort of more sophisticated discriminations in terms of yeah I'm not sure that's the case but

01:20:55

yeah you point to a long-standing mystery I wish I had an easy easy answer but again building a rich picture of the world isn't necessarily contingent on it

01:21:06

isn't contingent on having sort of true color vision as we understand it although clearly the octopuses are responding to something that enables them to match colors and I don't know what I don't know what to say about that

01:21:20

at this point Roger Hanlon yeah you can't assume yeah you can't assume that because you don't see the color receptors I mean in fact what you can assume is that the octopus is aware of color but in some other it's got a

01:21:34

different type of way of responding to it well you know again I I I won't I I'm not going to they say what you just said I don't disagree with it but I'm going to kind of become down on more on the agnostic track and basically okay we

01:21:47

don't know whether they're aware of it but we know that they can do something with it but I guess that the question underlying that question was given that that is the case there could be a lot of I guess that issue of how much is

01:21:59

happening in a sense outside the octopuses you know we so much of what happens in the human brain is happening right out of our consciousness of course you know so it's the same could be said for the octopus and it does beg the

01:22:12

question of what exactly you mean by you know Consciousness sitting on top of a much broader range of aware responsibilities right this is why I take great pains to link perception and

01:22:24

memory um memory is really critical to this equation when you take memory out it's pretty easy to sort of say oh okay you can have a bunch of responses you can have I won't

01:22:36

engage in antiquarian 1920s talk about reflexes or reflex arcs or that ilk but you know animals can do some really sophisticated things without any you

01:22:49

know evidence that they're sort of aware right they're doing they can they can even make certain kinds of discriminations which are pretty sophisticated not without necessarily being aware so yeah um I I know I have an answer to your I

01:23:03

haven't answered this in a completely satisfactory way but just suffice to say that yeah that introduces a fly into the ointment but I don't think it necessarily kind of hinders the

01:23:15

direction I'm going in I would I hope not at all right interested in how you thought about it because I find it hard sometimes to parse the questions themselves because of underlying

01:23:26

easily like things that I find easily confusing absolutely sure yeah thank you thank you very much sure thanks Carol yes thank you David brilliant talk if I could just expand the conversation to

01:23:40

say that for me any living creature is conscious including a tree in David Haskell's book the song of trees distributed Consciousness indeed the proteins that we vertebrate animals use

01:23:52

to create an electrical gradients and liven our nerves or closely related to the proteins in plant cells that cause similar electrical excitation dating back nearly a year a memory that helps

01:24:04

the tree to know when winterize it sells plant memories can cross Generations as The Offspring of stress parents inherit and enhance capacity to generate genetic diversity when they breed even if this

01:24:17

next Generation experience is benign conditions sure chickadee Birds distributed Consciousness itself are the dreams of trees and I just want to say that any living being must and has to be

01:24:31

conscious in some way in form so still so wonderful to focus on the octopus eye and thank you for this absolutely brilliant talk thank you very much thanks thanks for your contribution Ken thank you

01:24:44

okay Malcolm you're next hi Malcolm yeah hi there uh Dr Edelman yes okay David David's fine I was going to

01:24:57

ask the question about the octopus's uh color vision and I might also add from my uh old-time photographer's point of view there there were um video tubes

01:25:11

uh that um they were only sensitive to cyan and yellow and not to magenta but they interpolated the Magento and there was an absence of cyan and yellow so maybe

01:25:24

you know was doing something like that that's that's really an interesting observation and I think that also hearkens back to the work of of the great Edmund land you know inventor of the land camera founder of Polaroid

01:25:37

because he had a lot to say about this and he he's he came up with an argument with the theory really that in fact animals you could achieve color vision with only two two sort of flavors of photo it was sort

01:25:50

of an interesting argument it didn't it didn't get very far in terms of time you know not many people sort of remember that argument but he was a he was a smart guy he talked about this a lot and I think what we've barely scratched the

01:26:02

surface in terms of understanding how wavelength differentials are discriminating discriminated in the nervous system so we have a long way to go so but yeah that's a good observation

01:26:14

yeah I also want to make the observation most of my experiments have been with the bottlenose dolphin and um I'm afraid that octopus is just pale in

01:26:25

comparison I mean yeah they're smart for a relative of the clam I'll give you that I'm very smart relative yeah they just have a few behavioral tricks up their sleeve there's no evidence of

01:26:38

cotton cooperation I've seen between octopus and octopus right well yeah that's true I mean octopuses traditionally are sort of known writ large they're known as

01:26:50

sort of a social animals although you know you have folks like Peter Smith who observe in the sexual canopies well yeah yeah some some some do but but the point about it is

01:27:03

um you know while they may be sort of asocial I'm really really careful about parsing sort of um richness of of sort of cognition

01:27:15

cognitive capacity and you know sort of parsing into a space in which we can only talk of sort of about social animals clearly that I think that's an old rubric and I

01:27:28

think we have to be really really careful about that extending that broad Rush clearly social animals have in large part a degree of complexity neural complexity behavioral

01:27:40

complexity certainly neural complexity physiological complexity that is well above other animals in in most cases um but we do have to be careful of sort

01:27:53

of just saying okay anything that isn't social per se or but we can't observe as sort of regularly social and I'm very careful here because I don't think we've totally exhausted possible observations of behavior in the wild when it comes to

01:28:06

cephalopods there may be certain things that we haven't seen yet although we've seen a lot um so I pointed out a lot of the charm of octopi or octopuses uh lies in the fact that most of them are smaller than

01:28:19

we are as soon as they get to be a reasonable size in comparison to US they become a danger and I really don't think the octopus cares whether it be frenzy or eats you you know you're good either way

01:28:32

I'm not even I'm not going to go there but but I know I appreciate it um you know yeah I mean Point well taken thank you very much thanks I think we're going to go to a final

01:28:44

question and I think it's a good one because it's coming from Jennifer who's also spoken with us here now in a community about um octopus so I think this is a really nice moment to finish on thank you Jennifer great to see you

01:28:58

hi Jennifer oops I can't okay oh there we go okay I wanted to back up David in something that he said when he was talking to Carol which is that we know

01:29:13

that octopuses don't have color vision they don't they've only got one photo pigment but they can discriminate the plane of polarization of light and there's an awful lot of information

01:29:27

going on in that particular dimension right we don't understand because we don't have it absolutely absolutely I think that's super important yeah that's what I wrote about in my

01:29:41

review paper on perceptual richness about the richness of the perceptual repertoire of an animal that doesn't have the same richness as us exactly yeah yeah which makes sense oh

01:29:54

absolutely I think okay this is something a philosopher would say and I might not because I'm a biologist which is that the matching only has to be good enough

01:30:05

exactly we met we miss this all the time in all of biology and in in in an evolutionary policy in particular we've been really guilty of talking about sort

01:30:17

of matches as if they're they're perfect you know matches in the world and they're not you know they they never are yeah but they don't have to be and they don't have to be and and I'll hearken

01:30:29

back to an example that I think backs up what you just said which is the immune system and and that's something near and dear to my heart because my late dad was he started his his career as a scientist as

01:30:41

an immunologist and he was the guy who basically um confirmed the idea that the the the immune system was a selectional system that essentially

01:30:53

antibodies weren't coming up to antigens to pathogens and perfectly matching their protein confirmation to those antigens they didn't have to they had a repertoire and there was a fit between a pre-existing antibody and the antigen

01:31:06

but the the fit was never perfect and that built in strength built strength into the system because it meant that that antibody could actually also bind to other antigens which might have been slightly different and I think that

01:31:19

holds for even this observation which is far-flung you know it's far afield of of the immune system it's a very important idea that match isn't perfect and in fact systems that are more flexible are

01:31:33

built on matches that aren't perfect and that lends greater straights to those systems I think just my opinion so very good very good point thank you Jennifer

01:31:46

fantastic thank you Jennifer and thank you David this has been a really I think such a dense talk and I will make sure to try and get it up onto the YouTube channel as soon as possible because I think that everybody will want to be going back through that the other thing

01:32:00

I'll mention I'll put it in the chat now is that we do have a lot of um references and Jennifer you also just referenced a paper that you had recently that you had written so if there's any things that you wanted to share you can

01:32:12

also pop them into our slack Channel because there we can we can all access them so I've I've popped that again into our chat if anybody would like to join that channel um and there we can share some of the

01:32:24

references from today as well so this has been really fruitful and I think everybody's going away with their heads really full I think there's questions there's comments there's all sorts of extra reading that we're all going awesome so thank you David it's been

01:32:37

really wonderful and thank you everybody for joining we will see you at our next session which will be happening in one month's time so we'll be doing this in the final weekend of April we look

01:32:48

forward to it so thank you so much for joining us thank you everybody thanks so much have a good day take care you all bye