"If this were to be the case, this remarkable convergence of sleep behaviors in vertebrates and cephalopods points to the evolution of complex sleep in cognitively complex organisms with elaborate neural architectures."
The last common ancestor of vertebrates and cephalopods is a flatworm 750 million years ago. So this is proposing that nightmares, and dreams, and even sleep(?) are examples of convergent evolution. Which gets weirder the more I think about it.
There is a fairly viable hypothesis that dreaming could be regions of the brain attempting to kind of “protect their turf” by turning on and being active — thus necessary and relevant, and deserving real estate in the brain — as senses actually attempt to utilize brain regions utilized for other purposes throughout sleep. That’s why you can improve your ability to use various senses throughout life, such as if you go blind. This could have emerged a very, very, very long time ago in very simple organisms and thus could be present in most animals with a reasonably simple explanation.
That humans have stories, language, and nightmares within dreams (and evidently dogs as well, regarding nightmares) could be a more sophisticated version of this protocol that might be a mammalian thing, but fundamentally uses the same protocol. It’s like various regions of your brain turning on to say hey, I’m still here, don’t overwrite me with that other stuff.
It’s a hypothesis, but it’s a clean one I think. I like it. It works well to unify a lot of organisms and doesn’t seem so strange if it’s convergent — what’s really happening is more like a simulation to stimulate the brain.
I realize as I write this that the simulation part is maybe the most fascinating aspect. Why isn’t it random noise? Well, perhaps because part of the way our brain works practically requires running it through the simulator. But why would that be the same for an octopus, assuming it is? That being convergent would be more surprising. However, maybe the underlying feature of brains running simulations is actually common to far more animals than we realize.
A fly can anticipate something coming towards it and missing, and it won’t move. If the object will hit it, and assuming it’s not moving too quickly, the fly will move. Is the fly performing a simulation of the object to predict its path? Is that the same ancient simulation software?
I’m just rambling. It’s an extremely interesting topic and I had two coffees instead of one this morning.
Interesting ideas, I'm glad you had the extra coffee :-)
I wonder though if "A fly can anticipate" is accurate? As you question, does the fly run a simulation -- or more generally, does it have a mental model of the world. Given the size of fly brains, my guess would be no -- that it's more of a "when I see this, I do that" sort of a thing, honed by millions of generations of ancestors into an unthinking, but effective, state machine.
One thing I double-checked: our last common ancestor with insects is something like 500 million years ago -- much more recent than with octopuses. So even if there is some similarity with insects, that's no guarantee that it exists in octopuses as well. As an aside, it's weird to think that I have more in common with a fly than an octopus (genetically at least).
Looks like he's having a seizure for all I know. The paper is mostly a discussion of observed footage, and making guesses without presenting evidence that these episodes are actually linked with nightmares.
Could there be an equivalent of a brain scan for Octopus like animals? Given its in water and all.
You could probably compare his brain activity to normal sleep states.
Edit: turns out a linked article here mentions that
> Where do you put electrodes on an animal that has no shape?” study co-author Marcelo Magnasco, also a neuroscientist at The Rockefeller University, tells New Scientist.
Here's my crazy guess. He was either constipated with ink or was getting irritated by the parasites sufficiently to panic him into trying to expel them with an ink squirt.
Rats have played smarter tricks on me than any other animals I've seen. Sophisticated stuff involving quite precise guessing as to what my next steps would be. Call it theory of mind if you like. My dog is smarter in a generalised way, but boy can you do interesting things with a brain the size of a pea.
But the octopusses. The most fascinating part is not really their level of intelligence per se, but that it has evolved from scratch completely independent from us vertebrates. Bona fide aliens in our own backyard. Deep lessons on what converges and what doesn't.
I've had pet rats most of my life and they're so smart. They are cunning and manipulative for sure, they're so good at learning my behaviors and acting accordingly. Their food motivation is really crazy, check out what this lady has managed to get her rats to do:
Yeah I’m confused by this, isn’t it commonly understood animals dream? What other explanation is there for my dog moving her sweet little feet and barking softly while she’s asleep sometimes.
The brain structure / nervous system of cephalpods is quite different from vertebrate species I'm pretty sure. A lot of the similarities of the complexity/development are based on convergent evolution. So it's not as straightforward of a comparison. At least in this context.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin gets into the cephalopod-human communication challenges rather magnificently, if you're looking for a remarkable hard scifi read, though you have to go through the (also great) Children of Time start of the series.
I've had a bit of an ant infestation at a house I'm renting temporarily and I've been watching them and seen them do some pretty amazing stuff, intelligent stuff. Such as organize themselves in ways to solve pretty complex problems and even try help other injured or dying ants. These are ants, they're tiny little things.
Then I read the article here about killer wales destroying ships and other things they've learned, also the fact they get depressed when in captivity.
I couldn't agree more with you, and I also think it' why we should me more careful with the harms of our technological progress. It's not up to us alone to decide if we deploy some technology that destroys habitats, we should be equally careful when trying to "fix" habitats that we don't do a lot of harm as well.
One of the strangest behaviours I've seen from ants is seeing them(forest ants I believe) walk around on a catnip plant, clearly intoxicated, i.e unable to do anything but walk back and forth meaninglessly on the branches. And yet they seemed to seek out these catnip plants in significant numbers, which almost suggested some vague intent to get high.
As fascinating as the ants are, have you told the person you're renting from about the ant infestation? You might want to do that sooner rather than later, lest they blame you for the ants...
Parrots dream too, including wild ones. While I appreciate the need for scientific rigour, I'd be more surprised if octopuses didn't dream at all, considering their capacity for intelligence that's already been shown.
It’s one thing to believe that other vertebrates dream. There is a clear evolutionary link between them and us. Octopus, as mollusks, are very far away on the evolutionary tree. When our lineages split, brains were rudimentary, if they existed at all. If we assume some kind of intelligence in an octopus, is there any reason to assume that it works like ours does? Do they need dreams? Are dreams inherent in any intelligent being or are they a function of how our particular brains operate. I don’t think that that is a settled question.
> Octopus, as mollusks, are very far away on the evolutionary tree.
Yes, but for some fast, short, rough guesses, regard intelligence as thinking that yields advantages in surviving in the real world. Then guess that in general intelligence is a source of effective response to the real world. Then, whatever the size of the evolutionary and/or genetic tree, notice that we are all in the same real world. So, all of our examples of intelligence are effective responses to the same real world and, thus, the many examples might have a lot in common.
I think you're vastly underestimating the cognitive capacities of humans. It's not a matter of respect. A healthy three year old already meets or exceeds any animal in cognitive ability, including the ability to improvise tools to solve multi-step problems, pass the mirror test, and know some words.
Human supremacy is an empirical fact. A little 120 pound guy can hop on the back of an elephant and boss it around for life. I've seen 100 pound women make killer whales beg for treats. If anything we don't have near enough respect for our own awesome power over the other creatures we share this world with.
If we're wondering whether animals dream, I'll go with "overestimating" too. Yes, we're smarter than all other animals. No, we aren't that much smarter.
I’m comfortable claiming that building rocket ships and flying to the moon and back[1] counts as “that much smarter” than maybe using a twig to get termites out of a mound or escaping a fish tank in an aquarium.
[1] including of course inventing the necessary physics, math, logic, and actually doing the engineering in addition to pulling off the mission. And, of course, dreaming of doing it.
Edit: If octopuses or dolphins or whatever animal people think is so clever is in fact so clever, then someone should prove it by teaching them some form of durable symbolic information storage system and teach them to teach other members of their species what they have learned. If they can't do that, then they're not even close to as smart as we are, full stop.
To that I say - if you're so much smarter than an Octopus, then make yourself look exactly like a rock.
I would also venture that the apparent gulf between us and other animals is largely due to writing things down as you have inferred - but the ability to create an external persistent knowledge store is the cause more than the effect; the ability to store and share knowledge likely doesn't require a huge leap in brain power, but it does grant us a huge bonus, and builds on itself.
Meh, that's up there with the best we can do and an Octopus is still miles better without even trying - can you build and don such a suit tailored exactly to your current environment in a matter of seconds?
You should keep in mind that octopuses don’t live very long. The intelligence they gain in their very short lives is remarkable. Add to this that they live in water and therefore can’t have fire and can’t have writing. It’s not just brain power that matters… I don’t know that humans are the smartest critter on the planet, we may just be the most learned and the most able to exploit our surroundings. It’s cool and all, but I really don’t know for sure that humans are “smarter” than octopuses, porpoises, or orcas. We’d need evidence that didn’t rely on particularly human stuff.
I think that the crucial difference between animals and humans there is not necessarily one of definite intelligence but that we have a civilization and written language; no one person or group of people could have gone from discovering things like gravity, energy, algebra, etc all the way to spaceflight in one lifetime, but because we have long-term records we can work on things across generations.
What makes you think they don't already have such and we're simply too dumb to grasp how it works for them?
Don't you get the problem with your view? You're testing for human cleverness and then assuming all else is generally incompetent. This gets even more tricky when you start actually contemplating consciousness.
Also, can you build a rocket ship and fly to the moon and back? Why do you get to claim the feats of the smartest but other groups of beings do not get that benefit?
Orcas do teach their young to hunt and speak in the manner of their group, or clan, or pack. Different groups of orcas have their own culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if dolphins do the same
Sure, perhaps in 60 million years we’ll be extinct and Octo Sapiens will be colonizing Alpha Centauri, but today right now on this planet the gulf in intelligence between humans and the other creatures is gigantic.
> More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
I think this lines up with what I consider intelligence. The "we" is the human race and most of us acknowledge we are the most intelligent life on Earth using the measure we invented (retaining, passing on, and using knowledge). I won't be convinced otherwise unless some other being out there proves to us that they can do it better.
I’ll give up and admit defeat, but I still think it’s stupid to dismiss animal intelligence. Perhaps some day we’ll discover how to communicate with octopi and we could then work with them, perhaps. Call me crazy, but imagine we could work with them to go to places humans couldn’t because of needs we have that octopi don’t? Maybe it’s easier to send them to the nearest star, or something, I don’t know.
I don't think it's crazy to think what you're suggesting and I'm open to the possibility of pretty much anything being possible in the future. Of course we'd have to work out if we are actually communicating with them, whether they actually understand what we're proposing to them, and if we can unambiguously confirm their consent to be sent to another star in an effort to save all of Earth's species.
Before all that happens I think it'd be better to work out an arrangement where they help us crack some of the mysteries in the ocean first.
Ever met a three year old? It’s a complete mystery the human race survived this state of complete suicidal insanity. For all their beauty and cuteness I would be careful with claims of intelligence. It’s very narrow and very specific.
By having kids myself I actually started to demote human intelligence. We are smart eventually but it takes a long, long time and there is a mind boggling amount of stupidity before that stage is reached. Our final stage is indeed very impressive, I agree.
My mom has a parrot (would fly away in evening and then come back every morning to eat and then slowly stopped flying away and would stay overnight, so we decided to keep it) and it also has nightmares or something sometimes at night while sleeping. it would suddenly wake up very stressed, run around with feathers shaking etc.
The difference is dogs, cats, rats, and people all have a much more recent genetic ancestor, so it’s not a stretch to imagine they have similar brain structures that allow for dreaming.
All those Disney movies with singing fish and the like has lead to anthropomorphizing and assumptions that are still being reckoned with scientifically.
Dreaming is not a sign of intelligence, it is just a quirk, there is no reason other intelligent species must dream.
Octopuses are intelligent, but their nervous system is very different from ours, less centralized. We think they might dream, but it might just be anthropomorphism.
The best we can do is infer. We can't even know for sure what goes on in others of our own species -- we either accept what they say or infer what they might be experiencing based on our own experiences and the fact we're so similar. The further we get away from things "like us", communication falls away as does inferring based on similarity. I mean, how do you know that we even experience/"see" the same color when we both see something orange -- we agree on calling whatever we see as "orange"; but is my "orange" the same as yours? Consciousness is fascinating!
Would that be surprising, or shouldn't that be the default assumption that they dream similar like us?
I would swear I have experienced bad dreams of my cat, with abrupt movements and mumbled sounds, and then when waking or woken up immediately relaxing or even coming cuddling for comfort, very similar as with my human partner. Also dreaming in general, not just nightmares, is well observable sometimes.
I believe I have read similar stories of other's with cats&dogs, too?
We're all mammals, so that's less surprising. But octopi having dreams would imply convergent evolution, I think. It seems they may have evolved higher intelligence convergently - which isn't too crazy given the obvious utility of intelligence - but I wonder what it is about dreams in particular that would make them independently appear in different branches.
(Unless it turns out some common ancestor of all of us had something like proto-dreams.)
Birds are immensely closer to use than octopods though. Our last common ancestor was a worm with a very primitive nervous system, no brain and not even eyes.
Birds are not mammals but we are still both descended from vertebrates with complex brains, at least.
>Our last common ancestor was a worm with a very primitive nervous system, no brain and not even eyes.
Does it matter though? In the end octopuses evolved to be quite smart. That would imply some similar brain development, even if it was being done independently. The same way eyes would work and connect to their brains/nervous system more or less similarly.
Makes sense to expect design of later developed organs to match their function, despite the initial point of ancestoral divergence, is my point.
So similar designs for the development of function X that work, would be arrived at by many (most? all?) independent evolution processes.
Why would it be any more profound than any other common needs or functionality of two independently-evolved intelligences? Isn't this assumption begging the question?
Only if we a priori consider dreaming something very unique, or put it on a pedestal, would this be "profound". Whereas it could be an essential attribute of intelligent function, a kind of garbage collection from the information acquired during the day for example...
> if we a priori consider dreaming something very unique, or put it on a pedestal, would this be "profound". Whereas it could be an essential attribute of intelligent function
That’s the point. With N ~ 2, we have substance to believing it’s essential versus a fluke.
Definitely, I’ve seen both a dog and a pet rabbit dream, dozens of times. It’s pretty obvious, sometimes you can even tell what’s happening in the dream if you know your pet well. You can tell if they’re eating, running, playing or fighting. My rabbit would often have a nightmare and suddenly, violently wake up and start thumping her feet. What’s interesting is that she’d never met a real threat in her life.
Not the original commenter, but I have indoor cats in my apartment who can only go out on to the balcony. They have very animated dreams sometimes. They'll make whimpering sounds that are like muffles versions of the yowls they make when agitated and/or playing. Their feet will kick as of they're playing with a toy, and sometimes they will suddenly awake. Cat 3/3 in particular will awake "confused" and make questioning meows at me and my partner, before running to one of us as if to say "the heck was that?!".
It's interesting. Is it dreams? If so, are they dreams unsettling enough that they look to us for reassurance/comfort, or are we just anthropomorphising?
imo "pets" shouldn't even exist, same with zoos and similar, we should just try to look at wild animals outside, learn to approach and communicate with them. In captivity we can have plants, that's fine
I have the privilege of living with two young indoor cats.
One of them found me when I was walking in a nearby semi-rural neighborhood. He was about five weeks old, sitting on a fence, scared and hungry, mewing for help.
It was around dusk, the time of day when the crows and ravens and owls and other predators start looking for tasty little snacks like him.
I brought him home, gave him a bath and got the fleas off him, then took him to the vet where they gave him medication for his ear mites and worms.
The other was rescued from a similar situation by someone who brought her to Pets In Need, our local no-kill shelter, where I adopted her.
They are very happy here. They have good friends (each other and me) to play with and sleep with, tasty food that they don't have to fight to the death, and no risk of being swept up by a hungry bird.
One time as I was walking in the door, a raven started making a loud ruckus outside. Both kitties had a panicked look. They remember what their life was like as wild animals. When they saw me they felt safe and happy again.
It's a bit disturbing how pets became sort of toys and fashion objects
Let alone, there are many environmental issues (20% of global meat/fish, all services linked to them), a pet owner is rarely using a bicyle, but more a car etc..
For me it's a bit like a beautiful flower outside, should I cut it to bring it home with me? or should I just observe it there and leave it for others durably, for insects mostly?
A cat is a domesticated animal and it's obvious that they prefer living in a safe environment, or at least coming home to one, and bonding with their care providers (aka "family").
you forgot the most important point: food, that's why pets stay or regularly come back at that home (after smashing some poor wild creature for fun, it doesn't taste as good as their food made of 20% of worldwide meat&fish, their calories intake is about 20% of human, so that's billions of tons every year, shipping, pollution - pets CO2eq is around 2% of total emissions, concrete is 7%, personal cars are 20%, that give an idea of the importance)
No i didn't, that's part of providing a safe environment. Feeding creatures food isn't manipulation, it's providing for their basic needs. If my parents had stopped feeding me, I would have left the house too!
Every grown up animal can feed himself just fine, since forever, and also without your car, a supermarket and food shops, I wonder how long you can do it, animals know if you let them live in their natural environment
It depends, hens and birds in a field will prefer the tasty bugs & insects over the cultivated plants, many animals are happy with what they find themselves. A spider or lizard would also make a great pet, just like a plant
Choosing dogs or cats as pets is probably the worst choices in terms of sustainability
The total weight of pet dogs is higher than all other wild mammals, this is just shocking https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/environment/weight-respons..., not even talking about livestocks which are 10 times higher mass than wild animals, and serve for 20% to pets food. The amount and type of pets is pure destruction and nonsense
Obviously we're talking about cats and dogs here. Spiders and lizards don't bond with humans so they would not make for the same kind of pet. Your fact diarreah is a little bizarre. I think we're all aware of the horrors of the modern industrial world.
I like cats, but as a normal animal, wandering around like I do too actually, a silent and mutual respect, I can touch him if he wants, or just let him smell me, but surely not going to harass him, or worse imprison him
The love you're talking about is based on food, stop feeding him and open an exit, and see for how long he'll stay.
That's a bit like saying a wife is loving me, but I have to buy her lots of things continually, this kind of love would suck no?
Cats pretty much domesticated themselves for the mutual benefit of both species.
There are "captive" pets living in cages or other enclosures that might be a bit more dicey, but cats and dogs are probably a pretty poor example to get upset about.
an apartment or small garden for dogs or cats who usually cover at least 10km daily is captivity
another point is also their environmental footprint (20% of meat and fish production, many services and indirect pollution, impact on birds, lezards, etc..)
20% seems very high. I also thought their food was a byproduct of the meat industry, maybe that's the reason? It's 20% that no one else would eat anyway?
(I'm being pedantic but that'd suit my narrative, I'm mostly vegan and I'm easily annoyed by people with pets)
While we're on the subject of whether animals dream at all or not, I'm here wondering if, considering things like aphantasia, there are humans who don't dream.
I know 2 women who say they never dream. Both are very intellectually focused and spend their days in intense intellectual activity (engineer, accountant).
Weed makes me not dream.
When I do more Vipassana meditation I recall my dreams a lot. Some lucid.
Weed makes me much more still during the night, and suppresses my sleep talking entirely. So either it makes me not dream or it has other effects going on making me a more still sleeper.
It's what's left when you remove any sensory experience. Things happen, and when I wake I have the short term memory that they happened. You could describe it as narrative, but that would imply that there's language involved, and it's more abstract than that.
I agree. I’ve wondered at times if the extreme space constraints on animals evolved to be problem solvers/explorers/migratory, regardless of sentience, could cause brain circuitry to go totally haywire.
All these impulses to navigate the environment and nothing to do with it. I believe consciousness and sentience likely extends to all creatures to unknown degrees (not scientific, I know), such that keeping any animals in enclosures is likely to cause some type of psychosis. It would be hard for us to tell because we aren’t geared to identify how other animals go crazy.
Addressing this question the way it is phrased is quite challenging, primarily because our understanding of phenomena like nightmares or dreams is limited. The only defined understanding we have of these concepts pertains to humans, leaving uncertainty as to their relevance to other species. To illustrate, do nightmares require thought in a narrative format, akin to human thought? Are sensory inputs necessary? Are nightmares a product of certain consciousness aspects, or are they tied to any physiological mechanisms complementing consciousness? How significantly do nightmares differ, in their neurological makeup, from reflex actions or involuntary movements, or even from post-death phenomena such as rigor mortis? Is a nightmare an internal, subjective experience, like a theater play that one observes, or is it the mind making sense of certain bodily actions? And if one must observe a nightmare, who or what is the observer? A lack of precise definition for what nightmares even are immediately hampers our ability to answer such questions with any certainty.
It might be simpler to avoid subjective terms like "dream" or "nightmare" and approach this topic from a neurological perspective. It's evident that a neurological process is underway when an animal exhibits behaviors that resonate with its routine experiences (behaviors that exist within the semantic space of the animal's every day life). This is a relatively easier aspect to study and infer from; perhaps changes or activations in certain brain regions or neural nexuses responsible for the specific behaviors (recoiling in fear, locomotion, defence mechanisms) could provide insights. What triggers these changes? Are they spontaneous or do they originate from the nervous system? Do they result from cellular communication, presence of secondary metabolites, or some other factors? These are questions that we can begin to dissect and understand. With this approach, we can immediately engage in work and get answers.
On the other hand, it might be unhelpful to hastily anthropomorphize animals' experiences that appear similar to our dreaming. This assumption not only leaps to conclusions but also strays far from the realm where neurology or any other scientific discipline can provide guidance or some epistemology for verifying hypotheses. Furthermore, attributing human-like experiences to animals implies that we share the same experiences and invites our subjective bias. This not only introduces bias in scientific inquiry - something that by itself is unwelcome, but also limits our understanding of dreams or involuntary nocturnal behaviors. By looking at these phenomena from a human perspective, we risk overlooking critical aspects that could enhance our understanding of dreams (even in humans). To borrow from the term "standing on the shoulders of giants", we risk giving up a vantage point from these rigorously tested shoulders of science for a vantage point of the biased and subjective human condition. It's best to keep an open mind and consider both.
A helpful comparison can be drawn with our evolving understanding of life. Centuries ago, life was distinguished from non-living things based on factors like movement, growth, and size. Something that was alive was roughly between the size of an ant and a large tree, it had clear objectives in life, and generally speaking, it could move or contort itself to achieve the objectives. Decades ago, the criteria were self-replication and carbon-water composition. Now, we no longer confine life within these parameters. We are open to possibilities like silicon-based life, or life independent of water. We now have a broader understanding of life forms, considering structures like endosymbiotes alive despite their lack of self-replication. We also know a lot about entities like viruses, which we categorize as non-living, despite their resemblance to endosymbiotes. Today, we understand what is alive and what is dead not as distinct categories, but as a continuum, where on one end things are very vibrantly alive and on the other - inertly dead. This shift in perspective was possible once we managed to overcome human-centric bias. Scientifically, we could have made this discovery in the 18th century, a hundred or so years after the invention of the microscope and when they got reasonably good.
Similarly, in exploring phenomena likened to "animal dreams", we should probably adopt a first-principles approach, focusing on neurology and expanding our epistemology in the field as needed. By assigning human-like attributes to such phenomena, we risk introducing bias that could seriously limit our ability to comprehend what's going on, as it did with life for centuries. We jump to unhelpful conclusions from which we cannot reason - we can't ever verify the hypothesis that any instance like the one in the article is or isn't an animal dreaming, because dreaming is such a subjective thing we ourselves partake it. What is worse, we cannot define dreaming clearly because it is so far outside our scientific understanding.
The last common ancestor of vertebrates and cephalopods is a flatworm 750 million years ago. So this is proposing that nightmares, and dreams, and even sleep(?) are examples of convergent evolution. Which gets weirder the more I think about it.