Like Drugs Meh? Let's Give Then to an Octopus!
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When Gül Dölen first gave ecstasy to octopuses, she didn’t know what to expect.
Dölen is a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies how the cells and chemicals in animal brains influence animals’ social lives. Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, interests her because it’s known to make people feel more sociable, more interested in others, and less defensive. The same effects also occur in rats and mice—the animals that Dölen usually studies…
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-ecstasy-does-to-octopuses
- 5 comments, 9 replies
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Too many flaws in Dölen’s method to count. #fakenews #fakescience
@ruouttaurmind I wonder how stringent her inventory control was there at the lab.
@therealjrn It’s very difficult to get a reliable inventory count with the DJ Eclipse tracks booming and strobe lights everywhere.
@ruouttaurmind @therealjrn Very stringent quality control testing, of course.
@mike808 @ruouttaurmind
So are you saying we should all take ecstasy? Lol
@tinamarie1974 It’s what Gül Dölen would do.
@therealjrn @tinamarie1974 WWGD?
@tinamarie1974
If we were octopi …
@f00l @tinamarie1974 Alas, I am but a quadropi - do I get half a hit?
Perhaps this octopus was part of the study:
https://people.com/pets/woman-attacked-by-octopus-video-china/
If you like octopuses (or octopodes, not octopi), I have some book recommendations;
First, non-fiction - The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery. A fascinating and entertaining examination (and plenty of anthropomorphic speculation) of the intellectual and emotional lives of the cephalopods.
Second - Some of you may have read elsewhere that I’ve recommended Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky as my favorite recently written Sci-Fi novel; well, I’m currently reading the sequel, Children of Ruin and, about 3/4 of the way through the book, I encountered what may be my favorite phrase I’ve ever read in a novel: “octopus space navy”.
This author has a brilliant imagination when it comes to speculating on the inner workings of the minds of non-human species, and this story doesn’t disappoint.
Tchaikovsky’s insights into the octopus mind made me wonder if he had read Montgomery’s book, so I Tweeted him to ask.
His reply was that he hadn’t, his source material was a book called, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith.
It’s next up on my reading list.
/youtube octopussy