The Plot Twist Inside the Octopus Brain

Sun, 03 May 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Or: Why Your Brain and an Octopus’s Brain Disagree About What “Yes” Means

I have a confession that surprises no one who knows me: I am thoroughly, disproportionately, semi-irrationally in love with the octopus. The consultancy I named Groktopus is partly a tip of the hat to that obsession. The name does double duty. It gestures at the octopus’s distributed cognitive architecture, where each of the eight arms is half-neural and half-sensor, with surprising autonomy of its own. And it gestures at the kind of grokking-from-everywhere posture I want to bring to my work. But mostly, I just think they are the coolest creatures alive.

Weird-Science on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

The Plot Twist Inside the Octopus Brain