Just as a heads up – we won’t be meeting this Thursday as it is the 4th of July.
If you need your weekly update of weird neuroscience, here’s some light reading on cephalopod intelligence (e.g., squid, octopus, cuttlefish). Cephalopods are strikingly smart, yet on the evolutionary tree of life they are incredibly far from us and other animals traditionally considered intelligent. Their evolutionary distance (and subsequent extreme neurological difference) makes them interesting targets of study to see how conserved various neurological systems are. To give a very recent example, scientists gave octopuses MDMA (i.e., ecstasy) to see if it would increase pro social behaviors in a way similar to dosing mammals. It did, supporting the idea that some forms of the neural architecture that helps us socialize is hundreds of millions of years old.
Anyway, enjoy time with your friends and family, and we’ll start meeting again next Thursday!
– Jon Flynn, Ph.D.