Other Minds

My low rating may well be unfairly swayed by the fact that I bought this hoping for more of a study of octopuses specifically, and this book was about ‘intelligence' more generally and looking at the different types of intelligence that evolution has ended up creating. There are a few anecdotal stories about octopuses escaping their tanks to eat fish and some discussion of how they can change their skin colour but they are all too brief. The rest of the book deals more in the current scientific understandings of what intelligence means and how it might have evolved and while interesting, not really what I was looking for.

The author's style was a bit wishy washy. He often referenced research in passing but didn't offer any details about the experiments or how they worked, leaving you wanting more, and sometimes unclear as to how these unexplained studies actually related to the points he was trying to make.

For example:

rats with a severed spinal cord, and hence no channel from the site of body damage to the brain, can exhibit some of what looks like “pain behavior,” and can even show a form of learning that responds to the damage