The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
Sy Montgomery | Atria Books | 2015
⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)
In The Soul of an Octopus there is a time when Sy Montgomery reaches into a tank at the New England Aquarium and an octopus named Athena wraps her arms around Montgomery’s hands. What follows is not a description of a biological encounter. It is something closer to a first conversation, tentative, curious, charged with mutual attention. Montgomery describes the texture of the suckers, the colour changes rippling across Athena’s skin, the sense that something behind those alien eyes is actively assessing her. What a quietly extraordinary passages in recent nature writing.
That encounter sets the tone for everything that follows. This is not arbitrarily a science book, though it contains real science. It is a book about relationship specifically about what it means to form a genuine connection with a creature whose entire architecture of consciousness is so different from our own that the connection itself becomes a kind of philosophical event.
The Octopuses at the Center
Montgomery spent years visiting the New England Aquarium getting to know a succession of giant Pacific octopuses. Athena, Octavia, Kali, and Karma each had distinct personalities that the aquarium staff recognized immediately and that Montgomery documents with warmth and precision. Athena is curious and gentle. Octavia is maternal and watchful. Kali is mischievous. These are not anthropomorphic projections or if they are, Montgomery earns them, through sustained and careful observation rather than sentimentality.
The science relayed through the narrative is really interesting. The three hearts, blue blood, and a distributed nervous system of the Octopuses where two thirds of their neurons sit in their arms rather than their brain, which means each arm processes information partly independently. They can taste what they touch, see colour despite being colourblind in the conventional sense. They live fast and die young, most giant Pacific octopuses survive only three to five years which gives the book an elegiac undertone that Montgomery handles with considerable grace.
Where the Book Earns Its Title
The question the title poses does an octopus have a soul?, is never answered directly, and wisely so. Montgomery is not making a theological argument. She is asking something more interesting: what is the minimum threshold of inner life required before we extend moral consideration to another creature? And what does it mean that we share a planet with beings whose consciousness evolved entirely independently of our own not a variant of mammalian awareness, but something genuinely alien, arrived at through 500 million years of separate evolutionary history?.
Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? takes on the same questions from a more rigorous scientific angle. Montgomery comes at them from the heart. Both routes are valid. Both arrive at roughly the same place: we have systematically underestimated the inner lives of other animals, and the cost of that underestimation has been significant.
A Small Reservation
The Soul of an Octopus is not a perfect book. Montgomery’s writing occasionally tips from lyrical into overwrought, and the human characters who populate the aquarium scenes volunteers, staff, fellow visitors are sometimes sketched too thinly to carry the emotional weight she assigns them. Readers who come primarily for octopus biology rather than Montgomery’s personal journey may find the balance occasionally frustrating.
But these are minor reservations about a book that accomplishes something genuinely difficult: it makes you care, deeply, about an animal you have almost certainly never thought about before. And it does so not through manipulation but through the slow accumulation of specific, observed detail.
Recommended for: Nature lovers, anyone fascinated by animal consciousness, readers of H Is for Hawk and Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? and anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to shake hands with an alien intelligence.
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