The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

I surprised myself by how much pleasure I found in this book. The author feeds the reader so much incredible information about these geniuses of the ocean that she'll want to just meet one face-to-face, armed with all her new knowledge and appreciation. In addition to cephalopod facts, she also introduces us to the octopus tenders and lovers at the NE Aquarium in Boston, to the fish and turtles, to the life brimming within and behind the Giant Ocean Tank. Ms. Montgomery learns to scuba dive, despite painful ear problems, and some of the finest parts of the book are her encounters with octopuses in the wild. This is an unexpected joy of a read.

Full disclosure, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. There aren’t very many subjects that can hold my attention for 300 pages or so, and I find most nonfiction writers can’t help but lapse into pages of excruciating detail about the minutiae of their beloved topic. The Soul of an Octopus by noted naturalist and author Sy Montgomery has moments of this, but she keeps the book moving with her personal narrative of the more than two years she spent working with octopuses. (Yes--the correct plural is octopuses as she explains in the first paragraph of the book.)
Montgomery, a naturalist who has spent her life studying many different species, immerses herself in the world of the octopus with the help of the New England Aquarium. Not only show more do the many creatures that she encounters become beloved characters, but also her “Wonderful Wednesday” crew that she meets up with most weeks at the aquarium. In The Soul of an Octopus Montgomery explores not only the unique and fascinating lives of octopuses, but philosophy, consciousness, and what gives an animal their personality--and possibly their soul. PK show less

This was a lovely book—both fascinating and deeply kind, with a lot to interest a broad swath of readers. The science is accessible without being dumb, and at the same time Montgomery brings the octopuses (NOT octopi!) and their personalities (yes, they have 'em) really vividly to life. Plus I love reading about any interest that attracts the oddballs among us, and octopuses definitely seem to fall into that category—I guess I can count myself among those oddballs now. Thus ends any pulpo consumption for me ever again, and no big loss.

My poor husband. Every time we go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I have to park myself in front of the octopus tanks. It happens with any other place that keeps octopuses, too. I’ll stay there for an hour or so total. If not more. An octopus-only pass would be fine. Well not really. My fascination with them is long-established, but I can’t pinpoint a precise time it started. Maybe when I was a kid during episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Or any of the other nature books or programs featuring life in the ocean that I devoured as a kid. If money, time and hassle were no big deal I’d have one as a pet. And a raven. For the same reasons; they’re intelligent and I am convinced; self-aware.

I’ve long known octopuses show more are smart, but I didn’t know that they were so individual in their personalities. That was something Ms. Montgomery really brought to life with her book (and so much more). I was practically in tears by the end when she had to say goodbye to yet another amazing octopus she’d come to know and love. Tears. Over a mollusk. An invertebrate about as different from human or mammalian life as it’s possible to be and still share a planet. I just can’t tell you how much of a fan-girl I was while reading this book; oohing and ahhing and emitting the occasional squee. My husband...did I mention he suffers slightly from my manias?, well he was peppered with ‘did you know?’ and ‘OMG, listen to this…’, the whole time I read this book.

Like, did you know that octopuses have a dominant eye, just like people? That they have estrogen or testosterone and cortisol hormones almost like people? That they recognize individual faces? That they react to those different people in really different ways? That they taste with their skin and suckers? That they only live a few years? That some species carry empty coconut shells to use as emergency shelter?

Getting back to the hormones and the tasting with skin bits; I wonder if the chemical similarity between our species is one of the reasons they take to us so readily. We’re as alien to them as they are to us, but yet time and time again bonds form with captive octopuses and their caretakers. Without language we’re able to communicate and, dare I say it, care for each other. Even in the wild, octopuses have been known to lead divers around on a kind of tour of their territories. That is something I’ve never known a terrestrial animal to do.

At times, Montgomery speculates, with colluding researchers, on the reasons for the octopus’s intelligence, given that it doesn’t live long, doesn’t interact with others during its lifetime and has a distributed neural net rather than a centralized brain. In the corvid family (crows, ravens and jays) it’s thought their smarts come from being so good at finding food they have a lot of leisure time and get bored. Their antics are a product of that downtime. With octopuses it’s thought that the no-shell situation forced them to have to outwit their predators rather than just hide.

So wonderful that I really, really wanted one while reading. Or at least to have access to one at an aquarium the way Montgomery did. She said it was an honor to know and interact with these animals, and she’s so right. It’s a privilege that I was intensely jealous of, but could experience, however remotely, through her writing.

If you think octopuses are slimy, creepy, scary, unfathomable creatures, I think you need to read this book. If you already appreciate, but don’t really understand octopuses, you need to read this book. If you love nature and the mystery of consciousness, you need to read this book. If you’re curious about the different paths that evolution has taken to produce successful creatures, you need to read this book. If you’re breathing, you need to read this book.

Did I mention I loved it? show less

Summary: The author got to know a few octopuses in a New England aquarium in order to study and write about the intelligence of octopuses. But her story ended up so much more than just a description of intelligence. It was one of friendship and grief as well.

My thoughts: Loved this book. The author was so heartfelt in all she said – it was obvious that she really loved her friends, the octopuses. There was a good mixture of facts about octopuses and her personal experiences with them, making the book both intellectually engaging and personal.

This book is one part love story, one part scientific investigation of the native uniqueness of consciousness. The author sets out to learn more about octopuses and immediately finds herself having an almost religious experience when she gets the opportunity to touch one at a local aquarium. She becomes fascinated and obsessed with this alien intelligence and fantastical physical form of these aquatic icons.

This fascination will propel her to tackle SCUBA diving so she can observe octopuses in the wild. She develops research methods to test for personality, and allows herself the freedom to wonder what it might be like to taste emotion, see with your skin, and eight independent brains.

This book is full of octopus facts and theories to show more ponder. Perhaps more interesting is the author's own musings about her relationships with a series of octopuses in captivity. This is a personal and intimate history about intelligent life's ability to recognize itself in the other. show less

This informative narrative of a naturalist's "dive" into the world of octopuses - their physiology, behaviour, and intelligence - was a diverting read. As a life science teacher, I was coming to this with a fair amount of background knowledge, so didn't necessarily acquire any new insights or understandings. But the book works as a well-rounded summary of what we knew about the genus at the time it was written (2016 - I mention this because so much new info has emerged since then), and Montgomery knows how to tell a good story, weaving references to extant research with personal anecdotes (her interactions with various octopuses, her quixotic attempts to master the art of scuba diving) and the larger goings-on at the New England show more Aquarium, a complex establishment supported by a passionate supporting cast of scientists, naturalists, and volunteers.

I appreciated the balance the author (mostly) maintains between drawing attention to the apparent human-like behaviours and intelligence of octopuses while simultaneously acknowledging the limits of judging their intelligence using the same measures that we apply to mammals. As she rightly notes, mammals and cephalopods represent entirely different branches of the tree of life, having diverged so long ago that almost everything that we would appear to have in common - eyes, brains, endocrine systems - emerged via separate, potentially dissimilar processes. Measuring octopus intelligence using the same scales we employ for mammals (tool use, empathy) would be like trying to understand seashells using the same criteria (hardness, luster, fracture patterns) we've developed to characterize rocks.

As this book emphasizes, we are only just beginning to realize how ill-equipped we are to understand non-human intelligence. Montgomery's most useful contribution here, I believe, is making the case that we need to set aside preconceived biases and start considering the reality that evolution has not been a single, unidirectional march from primitive --> human, but a series of parallel processes, leading off in any number of as yet unsuspected and unimagined directions. show less