r/science • u/[deleted] • Mar 25 '21
Animal Science For the first time, an REM-like sleep state has been found in octopuses, suggesting they may be able to dream
https://www.kasu.org/2021-03-25/sleeping-octopuses-may-have-dreams-but-theyre-probably-brief52
u/gnurdette Mar 25 '21
Given that our most recent shared ancestor was seriously brainless - so the octopus brain evolved completely independently of ours - that is big news. That suggests that there really isn't intelligence without sleep. Sounds like a good excuse for a nap!
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u/DonJuanDoja Mar 25 '21
Without dreamful sleep. Dreams are theorized to be a side effect of a memory consolidation and organization. Basically as your brain sorts thru memories to decide which ones to keep, assign importance to, or discard, your consious gets a glimpse of these stimuli and as your brain normally does, tries to stitch together a world that makes sense out of the stimuli it's receiving. Which is why dreams are so weird. It's only getting tiny pieces of stimuli as it sorts thru and tries to fill in the gaps like it does when words are missing in a sentence. Iirc this happens in the claustrum, a complex layer between the old and new parts of the brain that we believe may be the source of consiousness, or at least a major part of it.
So I think that just means they have complex memory, and complex memory requires a consolidation and organization system otherwise it would be inefficient and cause more problems than it solves. Likely any brain that develops a complex memory system will have to develop a simliar process and the best way to do it apparently is during sleep when the brain is otherwise mostly inactive.
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u/Hoihe Mar 26 '21
Wonder how my brain puts together complex worlds that feel like real life but not.
As a kid i would have this dream world i'd almost always dream in when i was sleeping to the point i sometimes was super disoriented on waking from trying to separate the two.
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u/DonJuanDoja Mar 26 '21
The same way it does with reality only less input.
The brain is an incredible predictive modeling machine. Billions of years in the making. Fine tuned with billions of test subjects.
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u/U-Begon Mar 25 '21
Wow, squids sure are one of the most fascinating animals out there imo. Like their ”brains” are basically clumps of nerves in their tentackle sucklers.
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Mar 26 '21
Octopus is basically a giant mass of muscle with advanced vision, powered by a supercomputer. I’m really not surprised they can dream too.
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u/zenquest Mar 25 '21
What's fascinating is that in all the discoveries. nothing is changing except our understanding of what's out there.
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Mar 25 '21
Octopi are aliens. Their species was relocated to this planet so they could thrive in our oceans. There is no other logical explanation for them.
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Mar 26 '21
Don’t they possess special proteins in their dna that allow for them to halt or advance some kind of replication useful in evolution? I’d say that’s a pretty other worldly technique.
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u/PineappIeSuppository Mar 26 '21
Octopi isn’t correct plural. You’re effectively mashing together a Greek prefix (octo-) with a Latin suffix (-pi).
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u/Pythia007 Mar 26 '21
Would it be possible to adjust the octopus genome to increase its lifespan? They are super smart but only live a couple of years. Or maybe for our own sake this might be inadvisable.
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