'It's unlikely to be to the same extent as humans have with our mental maps and the representations we have of our body in the brain, but there is some sense of self-movement from the arms that is available to the central brain.' 'This shows us that the octopuses clearly have some sense of what their arm is doing, because they learn to repeat the movement direction that resulted in a food reward,' said Dr. If they pushed their arm into the right goal box, they could retrieve the food, but if their arm entered the wrong goal box, the food was blocked by a net and the scientists removed the maze.ДЇive out the of the six octopuses eventually learned the correct direction to push or unroll their arm through the maze in order to get the food. Rather than slowly exploring the internal shape of the maze, the octopuses immediately used fast arm movements, pushing or unravelling their arm straight through the side tube into the goal box.

The researchers created a simple Y-shaped opaque maze and trained six common Mediterranean octopuses to associate either the right or left path with a food reward.

'So our first question was - can the octopus direct its arm, based only on sensing where its arm was, without being able to see it?' 'We don't know whether an octopus actually knows where its arm is, or what its arm is doing,' said Dr. But crucially, while the learning process takes place in the central part of the brain, the information needed for the brain to choose the correct path is detected only by the arm in the maze. Gutnick and her colleagues have shown that octopuses are capable of learning to associate inserting a single arm into a specific side of a two-choice maze with receiving a food reward, even when neither the reward nor the arm in the maze are visible to the octopus. But her new research, published in Current Biology, suggests that the arms and the brain are more connected than previously thought.Дr. 'Some scientists think about octopuses as nine-brained creatures, with one central brain and eight smaller brains in each arm,' said Dr. Research has shown that octopuses' arms use reflex loops to create coordinated movements, and some octopuses can even distract predators by discarding limbs that continue to move for long periods of time. With such a strangely-built nervous system, scientists have long suspected that octopuses' arms may have a mind of their own and act autonomously from the central brain. But unlike dogs and other vertebrates, where the majority of neurons are in the brain, over two thirds of the octopuses' neurons are located within their arms and body. Octopuses have an extensive nervous system, with over 500 million neurons, similar in number to that of a dog. 'So this raises a huge computational issue for the brain and their nervous system has to be organized in a really unusual way to deal with all this information.' Tamar Gutnick, an octopus researcher formerly at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). The suckers can grasp, and the arms can twist in an almost limitless number of ways,' said Dr. First off, there are eight of them, each with over 200 suckers that can feel, taste and smell the surroundings.

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