The last common ancestor of human beings and octopuses was a small, flatworm-like creature that lived in the ocean approximately 600 million years ago. Whatever this animal looked like, it almost certainly did not have a brain in any meaningful sense — its nervous system was probably a diffuse net of cells, capable of detecting […]
Source: Most of an octopus’s brain cells live in its arms, not in its head — only about 8 percent of its 500 million neurons sit inside the central brain, with the rest spread across the eight arms and the optic lobes behind its eyes, in a body design some neuroscientists describe as the closest thing to an alien mind humanity has ever studied
