For most people, the octopus is a slimy monster out of a nautical nightmare. They might appreciate the octopus’ bizarreness from the other side of the glass at an aquarium but would shudder at the thought of touching them, or worse, letting suction-covered tentacles wrap around their arm. Sy Montgomery made it her mission to break down these plexiglass barriers by traveling the world, befriending these misunderstood creatures, and showing intimate portraits of individual octopus personalities, intelligence, even tenderness.

This could be devastating for some to learn, but let’s just rip the Band-aid off: “octopi” is a mistake that’s been crusted over by several centuries of convention. “Octopus” is a Greek word (octo meaning “eight”; pod meaning “foot”). The suffix “-i” is a Latin pluralization. English can be a crazy language, but we can’t just tack on a Latin suffix to the end of a Greek word.

Fortunately, there’s so much more to know about these cephalopods than bad etymology. For example, they change colors according to mood and surroundings. The giant Pacific octopus is bright red but can become sheet-white or dark brown to match the shadowy cavern it escapes to. One octopus at the New England Aquarium would produce purple patterns on its skin to match the purple toy it would occasionally play with.

It’s also assembled in a manner completely different than that of humans and their vertebrate, mammalian relatives. They have three hearts, and their blood is blue because copper rather than iron carries the oxygen.

They are also incredibly strong. They owe their strength to their suction cups that line the underside of each of its tentacles. One source estimates that a sucker with a 2.5-inch diameter can lift 35 pounds of weight. Multiply this by hundreds of suckers, and you end up with thousands of pounds of suction power.

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A fear of octopuses has been deeply ingrained in the Western psyche. It’s a fear that centuries of myth and art have fueled.

Roman philosopher and military tactician Pliny the Elder considered the octopus the most savage and dangerous animal and biggest threat to men at sea. In an Icelandic epic from the 1200s, there are rumors of a tentacled behemoth that drags ships and whales down into the murky depths. This myth inspired the kraken of Norwegian lore that has, in turn, appeared in many a seafaring adventure story.

Victor Hugo wrote in his classic Toilers of the Sea that death by tiger is preferable to death by octopus because, while a tiger can only eat you, “the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away.” Jules Verne’s 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea struck another chord of fear, with a giant octopus (which became a squid in the 1954 film adaptation) dragging the submarine  down, well, 20,000 leagues under the sea. In the early 1800s, Tennyson wrote a poem about a monster with “unnumber’d and enormous polypi.” During the colonial era, French sailors returned from Africa’s coasts with tales of giant octopuses attacking their vessels.

These influences have shaped our perception of octopuses. Far from the horrifying, blood-thirsty giants of the deep, they are intelligent creatures who can even become friendly with positive exposure to people. They’re also not nearly as large as legends have it. According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the largest octopus found weighs in at 300 pounds with a leg span of 32 feet. Even the octopus’ cousin, the colossal squid, doesn’t live up to lore. The largest squid discovered was landed off of the coast of Antarctica and weighed over 1,000 pounds. If there were ever octopuses with 100-200-foot leg spans, they don’t seem to exist anymore except in myth and the minds of ever-hopeful monster enthusiasts.

The brain of a mature Giant Pacific Octopus is about the size of a walnut, but don’t make the mistake of equating brain size with intelligence. The octopus is not your average mollusk.

The octopus has about 300 million neurons, compared to a human’s 100 billion. Its other mollusk compatriots have barely a couple thousand to rub together. Frogs have about 16 million. A roach has a million. One neuroscientist from University of Chicago maintains that cephalopods are the only invertebrates that have “a complex, clever brain.”

Their brains, however, are constructed very differently than ours. Whereas the human brain has four lobes, the octopus brain has up to 60 or 70 lobes. It’s possible that these numerous lobes are used to accommodate processes that occur simultaneously: the processing of information and actions for eight tentacles, the changes in skin pigment while taking in visual information, and collating the variety of touches and tastes from the chemoreceptors in different suckers.

So to what exactly do all the neurons and lobes translate? Octopuses actually get bored without a challenge or something to explore or dismantle. Without something to “octupy” their attention, they can be troublemakers. In an aquarium in Santa Monica, a small eight-inch-long octopus managed to flood the aquarium’s offices by tinkering with the valve in her tank. Bored octopuses also have a tendency to escape enclosures and wander into unexpected spaces. Security cameras at a UK aquarium picked up an octopus making its way down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night after escaping its tank. One small fishing vessel in the English Channel reportedly pulled in an octopus. It was found several hours later, not on the deck where it had been left, but hiding in a teapot in the cabin.

To curtail the daring exploits of these escape artists, aquariums have to make doubly sure that their tank lids are octopus-proof, and that their residents have plenty to do. Some will fill a Mr. Potato Head with crabs and other delicacies and let the octopus pull it apart. At the Seattle Aquarium, they give transparent plastic balls containing food. The octopuses enjoy the challenge and the reward of completing it. To the surprise of the aquarist feeding one octopus, it had not only figured out the ball twisted open in the middle, but he screwed the halves back together afterward.

An even more complicated variation of this challenge is a group of three transparent cubes contained within one another, like matryoshka dolls. There’s food at the center of the smallest cube. Each box has a different kind of lock mechanism that must be discerned to unlatch it and move onto the smaller box. Once the octopus grasps how each lock is undone, it can do the entire sequence in just a few minutes.

One octopus named Athena, came up to aquarist Bill at the New England Aquarium with an enthusiasm comparable to that of a dog when his owner gets home. And, like a dog, the octopus flushed with pleasure as Bill stroked her head, turning white, a color that indicates a state of relaxed contentment.

Some octopuses show a mischievous caprice, shooting jets of water in the faces of aquarists who venture near their tanks. Others, like Athena, show affection for those whom they know and recognize, and an insistent curiosity toward new faces, forcefully attaching suctions in order to fully taste them. This is not an anthropomorphism, by the way: octopuses really do taste with their tentacles. They have over 10,000 chemoreceptors in each suction. When you watch an octopus, you sense that they are staring back with an inquisitiveness that matches your own.

Jennifer Mather knows more about octopuses than just about anyone. Her expertise is at the nexus of biology and psychology. Mather has designed personality tests for octopuses that gauge whether an octopus is bold or shy based on their responses to a variety of situations and stimuli. In the presence of a foreign object, different octopuses will investigate it, blast it with ink, destroy it, or evade it all together. Impressed with the octopus’s complexity, she began to ask more probing questions than about mere behavior patterns.

Mather is a psychologist, but she recognizes that Freud’s Oedipal framework doesn’t help us that much with octopuses. There aren’t any complicated mommy or daddy issues, but she still began to see that these animals have differing temperaments.

For years, she was alone in her insistence that it’s not only human beings with personality. Her efforts were overlooked or ignored. More recently, however, Mather’s research was cited by a group of prestigious scientists (including Stephen Hawking) who met at a historic summit at Cambridge that led to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. This document signed by this gathering of scientists, affirms that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,” and that “nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

This is a fascinating development. Whatever the neurological conditions are that give rise to a state of consciousness, it’s present not only in humans but in many animals, including octopuses.

What is the soul? It’s been described in a number of different ways, as the innermost being, as the “I” that can contemplate itself, the spark that animates the body, the image of God, that intangible “something” that makes life meaningful, the nexus of will, desire, emotion, and intelligence. Maybe none of these descriptions is very apt; maybe there’s truth to each of them. One thing is certain, however: if a person has a soul, then so does an octopus.

A sense of self is central to consciousness, and there are many who would argue that humans have this and animals do not. The 2012 Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness contests the rigid distinction. Some skeptics of animal consciousness have argued that if animals were truly conscious, dogs would be able to free themselves from leashes, and dolphins would jump out of tuna nets without a problem. One wonders what the proponent of such a view would say about cases of humans in less-than-ideal situations who, for all their consciousness, do not sidestep dangerous or demoralizing situations like abusive relationships or obnoxious in-laws.

American philosopher Thomas Nagel once posed the question of whether we could truly know what it’s like to be a bat. There is a subjectivity to consciousness that cannot be captured in theoretical concepts. The bat navigates via echolocation; it’s a method of processing the environment that we can never directly grasp.

A similar question could be asked about the octopus, and it would elicit a similar response. Could we conceive of not just touching, but tasting other objects and substances through chemoreceptors in our manifold limbs? What if each limb literally had a mind of its own? More than half of the octopus’ neurons are located in their arms rather than centralized in the brain, after all.

We can’t know what it would be like to be an octopus. But they teach us about feeling, desire, and choice in new—and certainly not inferior ways. A creature that can taste pain, see dreams, experience deep relational bonds, think, feel, and show recognition and affection for particular individuals and not others are features which, taken together, are hard to ignore in the discussion of consciousness. Though we can’t experience “octopusness,” their remarkable intelligence and complexity merit openness to the octopus having a soul like you or me.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Soul of an Octopus here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.