Sy Montgomery peeps into The Soul of an Octopus

The weird and wonderful world of octopuses is explored by American naturalist Sy Montgomery.

Sy Montgomery sees octopuses as having an inner life as well as intelligence. Picture: AFP

Imagine, if you will, a creature separated from us by more than half a billion years of evolution, an animal whose boneless body can be as large as an adult human, yet still capable of flowing through a hole with the diameter of an orange. An animal whose head sits below its body rather than above it, and whose mouth opens in what is probably best described as its armpit; an animal with eight limbs instead of four, all covered with dexterous, highly sensitive and startlingly powerful suckers.

There’s more: it’s a creature whose uniquely sensitive skin can change colour at will, taste trace amounts of chemicals and even process visual information; whose neural processing is decentralised, so three-fifths of its neurons are not in what we would usually understand as the brain, but spread through its eight incredibly mobile limbs, thereby lending them not just the capacity for independent action but the ability to continue moving independently if severed.

That creature would no doubt seem completely alien, even monstrous. Yet what if you then were told that creature wasn’t just highly intelligent but capable of complex social and intentional behaviour. That despite living alone in the ocean, it could recognise and remember human faces. That it could dream and exhibit emotional responses. Might you not begin to wonder about its world, about the possibility it might afford you a glimpse of a way of being and a mind profoundly unlike our own?

That is almost precisely what happened to American naturalist Sy Montgomery when she joined the New England Aquarium to observe its octopuses. Initiated into the hushed dimness of that place, she found herself face to face with a creature of surpassing strangeness and wonder, a creature that seemed to be as interested in observing her and testing her limits as she was in understanding it.

Montgomery’s initial experiences at the aquarium and her relationship with the its 2½-year-old giant Pacific octopus Athena were described in an article published in Orion magazine in 2011. Montgomery’s new book, The Soul of an Octopus, builds on that article, but also goes much further: she seeks not just to record her experiences with the octopuses she encountered during her research, but to probe the nature of this strangest of beings.

Montgomery isn’t the only writer to have turned their attention to the octopus in recent years, and fascinatingly lucid as it is, her account of the science adds little to Katherine Harmon Courage’s Octopus! or Richard Schweid’s Octopus (both 2013). Yet as Montgomery makes clear from the outset, her purpose is not simply to recount the science but to try to understand the world of the octopus in a deeper and more intuitive way, “to touch an alternate reality [and] … explore a different kind of consciousness”.

For those of a more dispassionate temper this approach may prove troubling, and there’s little doubt there are moments of overreach. Certainly it’s difficult not to recoil when Montgomery describes the touch of an octopus as an “uplink to a universal consciousness”; likewise one suspects the anthropomorphism that leads her to compare a dying octopus’s interactions with her and its keeper as a sign of the animal’s courteousness obscures as much as it reveals.

But more often the result is fascinating and moving. Working with the aquarium’s dedicated team of aquarists and volunteers, Montgomery gets to know the various octopuses she encounters, delighting in their individuality and achievements and — not surprisingly, given these remarkable creatures have a lifespan of only three or four years — mourning their passing. And in so doing she demands the reader engage with them as creatures with inner lives as well as intelligence.

Given our difficulty ascribing inner lives to creatures unlike ourselves, this may prove confronting for some readers. When Montgomery writes that aquarists “learn the silent language of fish”, becoming able to smell stress and recognise emotion in their charges, she asks us to imagine creatures we are used to regarding as little more than slimy, cold-blooded automata are in fact possessed not just of the capacity for thought but feeling as well — a disturbing thought when one considers the wholesale slaughter and cruelty of industrialised fishing.

In view of this, it’s interesting that the most significant criticism one might make of The Soul of an Octopus is that it is too accepting of the practice of capturing wild octopuses and confining them to tanks, on which its narrative depends. This is presumably at least partly because of Montgomery’s relationship with the New England Aquarium and its staff, many of whom she likes and admires, yet it is hard not to wonder what this says about us and our readiness to encounter the alien consciousness that is revealed in this fascinating book.

James Bradley’s new novel, Clade, is published by Hamish Hamilton.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

By Sy Montgomery

Simon and Schuster, 272pp, $24.99