The Soul of an Octopus

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be someone—or something—completely different from yourself? This is the question at the heart of The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, a naturalist and journalist who invites you into one of the most unexpected and astonishing relationships in the animal kingdom. Montgomery’s central claim challenges our deepest assumptions about intelligence and consciousness: even a creature as alien as an octopus—boneless, blue-blooded, three-hearted—can think, feel, and perhaps even possess a soul.

Through her friendship with several Pacific giant octopuses—Athena, Octavia, Kali, Karma—Montgomery explores how these animals bridge the vast evolutionary gulf separating humans from invertebrates. In doing so, she offers something more than a nature study: a meditation on empathy, transformation, and what it means to know another mind. Much like Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees or Carl Safina’s whales, her octopuses reveal an intelligence that forces us to rethink consciousness itself.

Entering an Alien Mind

Montgomery begins her journey at the New England Aquarium in Boston, where she first meets Athena, a massive female octopus whose touch—via thousands of taste-sensing suckers—feels like a communion. The encounter is intimate, even erotic, but also unnerving. An octopus, Montgomery reminds us, is a creature so distant from us evolutionarily that the last ancestor we shared lived more than half a billion years ago. And yet, Athena looks at her with unmistakable curiosity. That mutual gaze sets in motion the book’s guiding mystery: how can two lives, built from such different architectures, recognize something of themselves in the other?

Each chapter deepens that question, blending storytelling with neuroscience and philosophy. Montgomery follows the passionate caretakers—Bill Murphy, Wilson Menashi, and others—who raise, feed, and play with these luminous mollusks. Their relationships unfold like friendships, complete with affection, mischief, and grief. When an octopus dies, the emotional aftermath feels like losing a family member. Through such encounters, the reader begins to sense that intelligence may take many forms, and that understanding might come more through touch and empathy than through language or logic.

A Mirror for Human Consciousness

Montgomery’s quest is as much philosophical as biological. She draws on thinkers such as Thomas Nagel (“What is it like to be a bat?”) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (“If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him”), asking how far empathy can reach beyond our species. Her answer comes not from theory but from direct experience. The octopus’s distributed nervous system—three-fifths of its neurons in its arms—forces us to rethink what a unified self might mean. Can an animal that literally spreads its mind through eight limbs also feel emotion, curiosity, or joy? Montgomery concludes that yes—it not only can, but does. The octopus becomes a living metaphor for consciousness itself: fluid, embodied, and multiple.

Montgomery’s exploration widens as she learns to scuba dive, joining researchers across the world—from Boston to Cozumel to the South Pacific island of Mooréa—where she watches wild octopuses hunt, camouflage, and even play. But the most profound lessons unfold not in coral reefs, but in moments of quiet intimacy—a hand offered to a creature that can suction, taste, and decide whether to trust you.

Why It Matters

Why should the inner life of an octopus matter to you? Because, as Montgomery shows, understanding them changes how we understand ourselves. She argues that consciousness is not a human monopoly—it’s a spectrum that extends across the animal world. Learning to see intelligence in unexpected forms invites humility, compassion, and a renewed sense of belonging in nature. The octopus, she suggests, offers a “portal to an alternate reality”—one that reveals the interconnectedness of all living beings.

By the end, Montgomery’s readers have journeyed from curiosity to communion. The octopus ceases to be a monster from the deep and becomes a teacher, a mirror, and a friend. Across her encounters—with Athena’s first touch, Octavia’s fading devotion to her eggs, Kali’s mischievous intelligence, and Karma’s gentle calm—Montgomery invites us to ask the ultimate question: if consciousness can take so many shapes, what might the soul itself be?

Sy Montgomery reveals that the octopus’s mind is unlike any other—and yet it holds uncanny parallels to our own. A giant Pacific octopus, like Athena or Octavia, possesses around 300 million neurons, similar to a dog, but their brain isn’t a single centralized unit. Instead, most of its neurons live in its arms, allowing each limb to act autonomously, sensing, tasting, and deciding. This distributed intelligence challenges human assumptions about what a mind must look like and where it must live.

Distributed Minds and Embodied Thinking

Each octopus arm functions almost like a semi-independent being. Even when detached, a severed arm can continue to react to stimuli, hunt prey, or coordinate movements for hours. Such distributed cognition mirrors cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and robotics, where designers model systems that think in parallel rather than hierarchically (similar to philosopher Andy Clark’s idea of “embodied cognition”). For Montgomery, this biological reality feels both alien and familiar—it’s as if the octopus’s intelligence resides everywhere, a living lesson that thinking is not confined to the skull.

Emotions in Unexpected Places

Despite its alien body, the octopus displays emotion and personality. Bill Murphy and Wilson Menashi, who worked closely with Athena and Octavia at the New England Aquarium, recognized unique temperaments—some octopuses were shy; others, like “Lucretia McEvil,” were destructive pranksters. Research by Jennifer Mather and Roland Anderson supported what the aquarists observed: octopuses can play, recognize individual humans, and even express curiosity and affection. When fed by hand or given puzzle boxes, they learn patterns, experiment, and remember their keepers—all behaviors associated with higher cognitive processes.

Scientific Resistance and Emotional Evidence

For centuries, Western science resisted attributing intelligence to nonhuman species. René Descartes dismissed animals as unthinking automata, and even Jane Goodall was once criticized for using the word “emotion” to describe chimpanzees. Montgomery situates the octopus at the frontier of this transformation. Observing Athena’s gaze or Octavia’s maternal care, she finds evidence that intelligence can emerge from wholly different physical architectures. The lesson for us: the mind is not what we thought it was—it can be soft, fluid, and boneless, yet capable of knowing and loving.

As you watch these tentacled thinkers recognize friends, manipulate locks, and even display mischief, it becomes impossible not to reconsider what counts as consciousness. Montgomery’s octopuses aren’t anomalies—they’re ambassadors showing that intelligence, empathy, and will are woven throughout the web of life, even in creatures that don’t look like us at all.

Have you ever felt instantly understood by another creature? Montgomery’s encounters with octopuses show how touch can bridge the distance between species. When she first meets Athena at the New England Aquarium, the animal’s arms envelop her forearms, tasting and exploring her with 1,600 suckers. The moment is transformative: “She already knows me in a way no being has known me before,” Montgomery writes. Through this tactile communion, touch becomes language, creating trust between human and invertebrate.

Meeting Through the Skin

Unlike humans, an octopus perceives the world through its entire body. Its suckers taste, its skin sees light, and its arms interpret texture and motion as thoughts. When Athena turns white beneath Montgomery’s touch—a color of calm—it’s an exchange richer than words. Later octopuses, Octavia and Kali, respond differently: Octavia’s touches are steady and intimate; Kali’s are exploratory and cheeky. Each relationship unfolds uniquely, proving that emotion can be communicated through direct sensation rather than through speech or reason. (Biologist Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens, makes a similar point about how sensations underlie emotion.)

The Spiritual Dimension of Connection

Montgomery doesn’t shy away from describing these moments as sacred. In the stillness of the aquarium, time dilates—what she calls “Octopus Time.” Much like meditation, interacting with an octopus requires you to surrender control and meet another intelligence on its terms. The experience evokes awe, a feeling that psychologist Dacher Keltner identifies as expanding our sense of time and empathy. In this union of curiosity and trust, Montgomery finds not only interspecies friendship but a glimpse of the divine.

Mutual Recognition

These creatures also recognize her. Aquarists documented that octopuses respond differently to people they like and dislike—showering some with jets of water while greeting others with gentle embraces. Athena and Octavia remember Montgomery long after she’s gone. When Octavia, near death, rises from her tank to touch Montgomery’s hands one last time, the scene carries the tenderness of an old friend’s farewell. As you read, you may feel that touch, too—a reminder that emotional intelligence isn’t bound by species or skin.

The power of touch, Montgomery suggests, is not just sensory—it’s spiritual. It’s how one being says to another: “I see you, and you are part of me.” In a divided world, that lesson may be the most radical discovery of all.

Throughout the book, Montgomery’s life parallels that of the creatures she studies. Each octopus she befriends represents a different stage of transformation—Athena, the awakening; Octavia, mother and mortality; Kali, curiosity; and Karma, serenity. Their short, brilliant lives compress wonder, love, and loss into three or four years, reminding Montgomery—and us—that life’s meaning often resides in its impermanence.

Metamorphosis and Mortality

Octavia’s narrative becomes a meditation on death. After laying her eggs, she devotes the remainder of her life to tending them, even though they are unfertilized. Her slow decline mirrors human aging—fading color, clouded eyes, and eventual release. Yet her devotion feels sacred, echoing Buddhist notions of compassion without attachment. For the aquarium staff who love her, watching Octavia die is devastating, but Montgomery reframes it as a lesson in acceptance: love endures even as the body dissolves.

Transformation Through Experience

Montgomery, once a writer observing animals from the surface, becomes a diver living among them. Her scuba lessons are comically arduous—ears popping, lungs aching—but symbolically vital. Breathing underwater, she says, feels like learning to live inside another element, an act of empathy made literal. When she finally dives among wild octopuses in Cozumel and Mooréa, she experiences what mystics describe as ego dissolution—a merging with a greater whole. “I am lucid in my immersion,” she writes, “voluntarily becoming part of the ocean’s dream.”

Octopus lives show that change—shedding old skins, letting go, evolving into something new—is the natural rhythm of existence. In their color shifts and shape-shifting bodies, Montgomery finds a metaphor for resilience and rebirth. Where others see slimy monsters, she discovers saints of transformation.

Montgomery’s narrative flows seamlessly between observation and reverence. She does not pit science against spirituality; rather, she insists they are two ways of listening to the same mystery. Her dives and lab visits are filled with precise detail—about neurotransmitters, chromatophores, and behavior experiments—but they are also epiphanies. For her, to study an octopus is to study what it means to be alive.

Seeing Through Many Eyes

Octopuses see polarized light and can change their skin pattern in less than a second. Some researchers, such as Roger Hanlon, describe their camouflage as “electric skin.” To Montgomery, this miraculous ability becomes an allegory for perception itself: each brain constructs its own version of reality. As philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith observes, octopuses reveal “mind without spine”—a different evolutionary experiment in consciousness. Recognizing this kinship expands our spiritual imagination; understanding that awareness can arise in other forms dissolves the illusion of human exceptionalism.

Empathy as a Scientific Tool

For decades, researchers avoided anthropomorphism, fearing it would cloud objectivity. Yet Montgomery argues that empathy is not bias but insight. Her ability to perceive personality in these animals springs from love, not projection. (Ethologist Frans de Waal makes a similar argument, suggesting empathy bridges scientific observation and moral understanding.) Her work echoes that of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey: to know another being, you must care for it deeply.

By uniting biology and spirituality, Montgomery creates a third way of knowing. The octopus becomes her muse—a scientist’s subject and a mystic’s guide. Its many arms stretch toward both microscope and cosmos, proving that wonder and wisdom are not opposites but companions.

In the book’s final chapters, Montgomery grapples directly with the nature of consciousness. What does it mean to be aware? To feel? To know? Through her relationships with octopuses and conversations with experts like Jennifer Mather, she presents a radical inclusive vision: consciousness is not a fixed property of humans but a spectrum that spans the animal kingdom. In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness officially supported this view, naming octopuses among animals possessing the neurological substrates for awareness.

Different Minds, Shared Feelings

Montgomery learns that understanding consciousness requires humility. The octopus’s mind is distributed, its perception alien, its sense of self fluid—yet its emotions seem familiar: curiosity, fear, affection, grief. When Octavia, nearly blind, raises a frail arm to touch Wilson’s hand one final time, it’s impossible not to feel the presence of awareness looking back. Consciousness, Montgomery suggests, may not always speak our language, but it knows love when it meets it.

The Continuum of Awareness

By comparing octopus intelligence to human, mammalian, and even insect cognition, Montgomery invites a paradigm shift. Researcher Björn Brembs found evidence of behavioral choice in fruit flies; dolphins, parrots, and elephants display creativity and empathy. If volition and emotion exist across species, then consciousness itself is a shared inheritance of life—a unifying current, much like the ocean that connects every shore. This idea echoes Eastern philosophies in which mind permeates all living things, a concept Montgomery encounters in Tahitian legend of the octopus-god Na Kika, who raised the islands from the sea.

By the book’s end, “the soul” is no longer a metaphor but a biological and spiritual truth. Every interaction—every gaze, every tentative touch—becomes evidence that awareness is not exclusive to humans but the heartbeat of existence itself. When Montgomery claims, “If I have a soul, the octopus has a soul too,” she isn’t being poetic; she’s stating a discovery that may change what it means to be alive.