Neuroscientists Study These ‘Alien’ Intelligences Right Here on Earth

When we think about extraterrestrials, many of us picture strange creatures in distant galaxies which may (or may not) resemble life existing on our own planet. But if you ask a neuroscientist, they can point you to some things right here on earth which could easily be mistaken for the stuff of science fiction.

This was the premise of “BrainFacts LIVE: Alien Intelligences,” a public event held at Haymarket Pub & Brewery in Chicago during the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in October. Two neuroscientists gave brief talks on their areas of expertise: octopuses and AI. Although not literally alien, both subjects have an otherworldly quality to them, especially when juxtaposed against our human brand of intelligence.

Forrest Collman of the Allen Institute kicked off the night with a look at how the artificial neural networks behind AI differ from the biological ones which structure our brains.

“Networks are a set of nodes and connections where one node can influence another node,” Collman said. While billions of neurons serve as the core nodes within the human brain, he explained, AI is powered by artificial neural units mirroring this basic structure.

Although human and artificial intelligence may resemble one another on a surface level, their differences are more numerous. For one, Collman noted, there are thousands of different types of neurons, each of which are equipped to carry out different tasks. Artificial neural units, meanwhile, are identical to one another. Also, he added, while the AI landscape is shifting rapidly as human engineers tinker with it, it’s taken eons for living brains to evolve under the comparatively glacial force of natural selection.

If plenty of daylight remains between humans and machines, how do we compare to a radically different kind of animal intelligence? Cassady Olson, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, studies motor control among octopuses. She told the Haymarket crowd these marine creatures have the largest nervous system of any invertebrate. Their eight arms are covered in hundreds of suckers, and although they don’t possess any bones, each of them contains the equivalent of a spinal cord.

These remarkable creatures are of particular interest to neuroscientists because of their ability to coordinate complex behaviors, she explained, like using materials to build shelters or unscrewing the cap of a jar to reach the tasty crabs inside.

“How do you develop a nervous system that can control not only eight highly flexible arms, but also hundreds of flexible suckers?” Olson said. For all the fascinating facts they do know about octopuses, she noted, scientists have barely scratched the surface of how their brains work, which Olson said makes her field a particularly “interesting realm of research.”

As these researchers work to better understand the structure and function of octopus brains and artificial intelligence, comparisons to humans teach them crucial information about our own brains, and about the vast world of intelligence beyond the confines of our mammalian minds.

About the Author

Bella Isaacs-Thomas

Bella is the Staff Writer and Editor for BrainFacts. She previously worked as a digital science reporter at PBS NewsHour, where she was named a fellow in the 2022-2023 class of the National Science-Health-Environment Reporting Fellowships (SHERF) and earned a 2021 D.C. Science Writers Association Newsbrief Award for writing. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree in 2018.