Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff. Lauren vogelbamb Here. Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. It's possible. The same could be said about cephalopods, the group of invertebrates that include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. The last ancestor we shared with one of these living jello
salads was probably a worm of some kind. So our DNA is basically nothing like their's, not that they care. They didn't really do evolution the same way we did, but nevertheless managed to independently evolve into uncannily clever camouflage artists with large, complex brains, closed circulatory systems, and camera style eyes just like ours, well not just like ours. The thing about cephalopods is they've had five hundred million years of independent evolution to figure out how to do
things their own way. Any test you can create to measure some thing in a human intelligence, say, isn't going to work for an octopus, which is why neurobiologists studying cephalopods have jobs not unlike that of electricians figuring out the electrical grid on an alien planet. We spoke with Dr Sabrina Pankey, an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Biomedical Sciences at the University of New Hampshire.
She said, we've known for fifty years that the cephalopod brain is easily the most complex among invertebrates, and also that there dazzlingly intricate body patterning. Behavior is controlled by motor centers in the brain. However, the neural architecture has
been much more enigmatic. Figuring out the neural basis of complex behaviors is inherently difficult in any animal, but trying to figure out how as squid can completely change its body patterning in a matter of milliseconds, or display one pattern to the squid on its left and another to the one on its right, is a sticky wicket, as
you can imagine. One hypothesis has been that body coloration is organized in the cephalopod brain somato topically, that one specific part of the central nervous system is solely responsible for controlling the patterning in a distinct patch of skin. That's how it works in our mammalian cortex. After all, but a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience shows again cephalopods are not like us, and are in
fact very not like us. The research team proposes its study subject, the oval squid, also known as the big fin reef squid, achieves its skin patterning through mosaic organization. That these squid actually use multiple motor centers within the optic lobe of their brain to produce a single skin pattern like stripes, bands, or spots. The fact that several parts of the brain work together it wants to create a single display allows for greater complexity in the resulting pattern.
It would be like using multiple keyboards to write the
same document all at the same time. We've vertebrates just don't do things that way, not to Chun Tin Chio, director of the Institute of Systems Neuroscience at the National Singhua University in Taiwan, and his co author and student Sung Han Liu, think that because several different areas of the optic lobe can be used to display a single skin pattern in a specific body part dark mantles, stripey tentacles, polka dot fins, that the squid are able to flash
about fourteen distinct patterns in the blink of an eye. We tend to think of redundancy as inefficient, but cephalopods have overlapping parts of their brains to create specific patterns on specific body parts, meaning that if one part of their brain is busy, they can still flash information onto their bodies with a inspiring quickness. Just think if you had a bunch of different parts of your brain in charge of remembering a single word, your word recall skills
would be amazing, GEO said via email. We think this research is particularly interesting because it shows how squids can efficiently modulate the expression of individual body pattern components, thus changing the appearance of their body color dyna amically. This allows the squids to quickly switch different body patterns in visual communication. Thus it is sort of like an alphabet
visual language. The researchers think the color patterns displayed by the squid are not only used as communication signals to the same species, but are also used to hide or worn off other potential predators or prey. This research also highlights the fact that though we vertebrates tend to think we've got the best systems for doing everything, cephalopods might be onto something, at least when it comes to efficient communication.
Panky said, the way these body patterns can be created thanks to various combinations of brain centers activating reminds me of word creation in a glutinative languages like German. There is a linguistic mechanism to create compound words that then take on new meaning. Maybe eventually will know enough about the cephalopod brain that we can find out whether squid learn word patterns by observation or if the information is hardwired,
and whether different populations speak in different patterns. But for now, the researchers are focusing on learning how visual information from the eyes regulates body patterning in the squids when they are communicating with each other in their natural environments. Geo said, this will be much more difficult than anything we've shown so far. Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and
produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff has merchandise now. You can contain your liquids, electronics, and or body in brainy style by visiting t public dot com slash brain stuff, and of course, for lots more on this and other Squidgee topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com