Do Octopuses Dream? | Deep Questions with James Cameron & Dr. Alex Schnell | National Geographic

[Music] I've been inspired by octopuses my whole life, just with the camouflage, with the mimicry, and just so many different ways of locomotion. Every octopus that you meet will have a different personality, and I've been lucky enough to build a relationship with the day octopus. She had a little scar just below her eye, so I ended up naming her Scarlet.

She's out, she's sleeping. She's sleeping, she's octopus snoring. It's really interesting 'cause she goes through quite a still sleep cycle here, but then she'll have a moment where she starts to move. This is what we call an active phase of sleep. Yeah, like real sleep, like R sleep. What happens when humans have an active phase of sleep is we dream, right? And so, it might mean that she's also dreaming.

Yeah, oh, she's dreaming, trust me. Come on, look! I mean, it's like a dog's paws, you know, when they're chasing rabbits in their dream? 'Cause we don't know if dogs are dreaming, but we know dogs are dreaming. We know it, absolutely. And that could mean that she's processing memory. She may literally be remembering bits of environment that have those colors as if, oh, if I had to suddenly blend in here, if I had to suddenly blend in there, what would I do?

Yeah, or she might be flashing a color the way that she might flash in the wild if she just caught a crab, right? Yeah, really! So that could be experience, could be location, could be building, you know, some kind of geographic map, building a mental map of her habitat, which could save her life in a future encounter. You really sense her curiosity about you, and you can sense that she's analyzed the situation and realizes there's not a real threat here.

Now, how could she have any basis for that? I ask myself that question all the time. Yeah, I think there's a lot going on in Scarlet's brain, and they don't have anyone to learn from. It's not culturally passed down; there wouldn't have been any kind of innate memory of that. I think everything is learned from their environment. Perhaps they're motivated to experience so that they can keep on learning.

I think it's amazing how quickly she discarded the idea that you might be threatening, you know, even to the point of initiating contact. Curiosity outweighed the danger signals; a bigger creature unfamiliar could be anything, you know? And she, like you said, she initiates the touch, which is really important.

How hard can this mantis shrimp strike with those four limbs? Well, it looks tiny, but the strike is as quick as 50 mph, and some species can even break through aquarium glass with a single punch, right? So the stakes are high for her, and she doesn't have, you know, a shell. She doesn't have a skeleton, she doesn't have claws. So her brain is the ultimate weapon here, and she's gone out and created this defensive shield just by thinking about it. Imagining it, probably looks around the landscape and says, "Well, those clams have got the right idea, I’m going to go get that."

But it's tool use! It is tool use! She's using something in her environment to manipulate, and that's essentially the definition of tool use. So here we are back with the day octopus, right? And you're doing this pointing gesture. The day octopus, they don't live in groups, but they form these unlikely partnerships with reef fish.

MH and so they will go out hunting sometimes with a coral trout, and the way the coral trout tells the octopus that there might be food somewhere is his nose. They do a headstand and point their nose. It gave me an idea when I was down there, right? So, it made me start to think: if they can understand a fish doing a headstand, I wonder if she will understand if I point.

As I was going on this hunt with her, I noticed that she was missing a few crabs, and they're really quick. I mean, they kind of escape really quickly, and so I tried to help her out and I started pointing, so your hand became like the fish!

Yeah, it was such an incredible moment! Here we are, separated by 550 million years of evolution, and we're having a conversation. Wow, that's big! M, that's really big! There's still so much we don't know, and I feel like even when you do come to a conclusion, it opens up 10 other questions. Exactly! We have so much to learn, and that's just our world.

Way do we go to other planets, start all over again? EXA [Music]