From the brains behind Brains-on, this is the Moment of Um.

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Shayla Farson.

I remember the first time I ever saw an octopus. I was walking around an aquarium in Seward, Alaska,

and that's when I saw her. A giant Pacific octopus inside a dimly lit tank. She was hanging upside down,

her long, thick arms clinging to the sides of the tank. Each arm was covered in rows of suction cups,

some as big as a quarter. But she wasn't moving those big, powerful arms. She was asleep,

her eyes tightly closed. And as I watched, her coppery orange octopus skin pulsed with different patterns and colors.

Have you ever watched a person sleeping and seen them smile or laugh or scrunch up their brow?

This octopus kind of looked like that. It made me wonder, was she dreaming? To dream an octopus would need a brain, right?

Do octopuses have brains?

Our friend Eva asked about this, too.

They have brains, and they're different than our brains.

My name is Paul Bertel, and I'm an associate professor of avian biology at Pennsylvania State

University. So, like, our brains, you know, they're in sort of like one big mass inside of our head.

Well, Octopi have multiple sort of blobs in their head. So they have these sort of different lobes of their brain that are in the head,

but then they also have a lot of their brain dispersed throughout their body.

And these are really interesting too because they don't necessarily

need to communicate with the main brain and the head in order to function.

They can take in information from one arm and send it to another arm

without actually sending it up to the brain and then back out to the other arm.

If we had something in one hand, if we're then

needing to move our other hand, that information would, you know, come from a hand, up the spinal

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