![]() ![]() But this task can become much more challenging when we try and understand other animals. We spend much of our time trying to figure out what other people are thinking. The answer is as unexpected as it is profound. ![]() How is a 98 degree, hairy, bony, air-breathing biped supposed to understand a 47 degree, boneless, eight-limbed, water-breathing blob covered in suction cups? Well, acclaimed nature writer Sy Montgomery doesn’t let a little slime get in her way and in The Soul of an Octopus she sets out to find out if a human and an octopus can develop true friendship. For the past 500 million years humans and octopuses have evolved their substantial cognitive abilities on vastly different branches of the evolutionary tree, so that a seemingly impassable gulf now exists between the species. But there may be no intelligent creature more foreign to the human experience than the octopus. Truth be told, we often struggle to understand each other. There’s no particular reason humans should be able to understand other animals. ![]()
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