Neuroscientists have found that we have more in common with the clever octopus than previously thought.
Researchers from the University of Oregon discovered that octopuses map out their visual space in much the same way humans do.
The researchers studied octopuses’ neural activity when responding to light and dark spots in the space around them. Interestingly they found that the activity is very similar to that seen in the human brain.
According to the report author Cristopher Niell, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon:
“Nobody has actually recorded from the central visual system of a cephalopod before…these papers provide a nice foundation by elucidating the different types of neurons and what they respond to — two essential aspects we’d want to know to start understanding a novel visual system. We were able to see that each location in the optic lobe responded to one location on the screen in front of the animal. We hoped that the visual map might be there, but nobody had directly observed it before.”
You can find the original research here.
