October 15, 2025 • 30 mins
They are clever and flexible thinkers, but what's the limit of their intelligence? Jorge wraps his arms around this mystery with three cephalopod experts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, Welcome to Science Stuff, a production
of iHeartRadio. I'm Hoorheit cham and today we're asking the
question how smart is an octopus? We've all seen the
videos online of octopuses appearing to do amazing things and
(00:24):
be curious and clever, but it is there real intelligence
behind those eight arms. We're going to talk to three
octopus experts, including an animal psychologist, a National Geographic underwater explorer,
and a neurobiologist. We're going to talk about how octopuses
evolved but their brain is like what they can do.
(00:44):
And then at the end we're going to tackle the
big mystery about why octopuses even exist. So come be
under the sea in an Octopus's science garden as we
answer the question how smart is an octopus?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Everyone, Today we're talking to three experts. First is a
scientist who's been studying octopuses for fifty years, Professor Jennifer Mather.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
I'm recently retired professor in the Department of Psychology, University
of Lethbridge.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
What is your background studying octopuses.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well fifty years. As a kid, I grew up at
the edge of the ocean and taught the animals were
wonderful and fascinating and decided I was going to study
them when I grew up.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
What made you so obsessed with octopuses?
Speaker 3 (01:38):
They're fascinating and wonderful. I love watching the weaving move
and I love watching the patterns that they show on
their skin, and I love trying to figure out what
they're doing with all those.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Arms because it's so different from us.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yes, they're not aliens, they're just different.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
The second expert is doctor Alex Schnell, the National Geographic Explorer.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I am a comparative animal psychologist, and that is just
a fancy word for saying I study animal minds, and
the particular group of animals that I mainly study are
the cephalopods, which include octopus, cuttlefish, and squid. I'm interested
in their capacity to learn and their capacity to remember,
(02:25):
and so I get inspired by some of the studies
that have been conducted in humans and children and adults,
as well as other vertebrate animals, and I try and
adapt those and see if cuttlefish and octopuses can solve them.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
You sort of run the same tests that people have
done on those animals, on cuttlefish and octopuses. Yeah, and finally,
our last expert is doctor Tamar Gudnik.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
I am a researcher no esologists studying sophalo pods of
various types for the past almost twenty years now. Then
my main research animal has been octopus.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Amazing. What does neuroethnologist mean?
Speaker 4 (03:11):
It is the connection between study of behavior and neuroscience,
So how the brain creates behavior?
Speaker 1 (03:20):
All right? The first thing I wanted to ask our
experts was how did octopuses evolve? I mean, they're so
different from us. Where did they come from?
Speaker 2 (03:31):
So? Cephalopods appeared over five hundred million years ago, and
originally their ancestors had shells like the nautilus'es, and then
many of the lineages moved into deep water where they
gradually lost their shells. Really that meant that they tradeed
defense for mobility and flexibility because they're able to be
(03:52):
a bit more agile.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Now, okay, So cephalopods, which include octopuses, cuttlefish, and squids,
branched the evolutionary tree of life about five hundred million
years ago. This was a long time ago, and they
started off as squishy animals with shells, kind of like
the nautilus that then ventured out to the deep sea
(04:14):
where they lost their shell. Why did they lose their shell?
Why weren't shells useful down there?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well, we think that potentially in the darkness, you might
not need a shell to protect yourself, and so it
really was a trade off. Now they're completely soft bodied,
but now they've got more mobility and more flexibility to
move around, I.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
See, and you don't have to carry around a giant.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Shell totally no baggage.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
All right. So in the deep, dark, open ocean, there
weren't as many animals trying to eat them, so they
devolved their shell. But then eventually some of these squishy
pre octopuses moved back to shallow waters. There things got dangerous,
you know.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
We see think that they probably faced intense predator pressures
compared to many other animals because they have no teeth,
no claws, no antlers, no shell, nothing to protect themselves,
and so they really had to use their ability to
blend in like their camouflage or their brains to kind
of one up all the things in the ocean that
(05:20):
might want to eat them.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Interesting, there were boneless filets. Basically, yes, exactly skinless boneless
was it perfect snack?
Speaker 4 (05:30):
And the idea is that they evolved in a sort
of an arrange race with bony fish. There were prey
and predator for each other. And with the speed and
a predatory lifestyle, there was also an increase in intelligence
or cognitive ability.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
And so the pressure was on them to be smarter
in this environment of competition.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Well, I mean, the more you move, the more of
nervous system you need.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
So the history of octopuses is that they were not
lost their shells, but when they came back to shallower waters,
suddenly they were very exposed. And so to survive they
had to get smarter, and that meant upgrading their brains.
So the next thing I asked their experts to do
was to describe and octopus's brain. What can you tell
(06:20):
us about the neurology of octopuses.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
By the definition we use for brain size, which is
brain body ratio, they have a fairly big brain, bigger
than a pigeon, bigger than a laborate.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I see, yes, relative to their size, octopuses are as
the kids say, big brain and This is interesting. That
brain is in the shape of a donut.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So, yeah, cephalopods have really unusual and highly specialized brains.
So their central brain forms like a donut shape that
wraps around their throat. And so they're esophagus what so
all the food that they ate passes through their brain.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
What do they have a donut brain?
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Fascinating.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
It also has a limiting size in terms of what
you can eat because the esophagus goes through the brain.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
It limits the size of things they can eat because
it has to pass through the brain. So they really
think through their food literally. Yeah. The other unique thing
about octopuses is that they have a lot of neurons
and most of those neurons are not in their central brain.
How many neurons or green cells do octopuses have?
Speaker 4 (07:34):
So there are two things. One is how many nerve
cells do they have? That is around five hundred mealsman,
But about more than half of that is actually outside
the brain, so it's outside the central nervous system.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
But the interesting thing about it is three fifths of
their neurons are not in that brain. They are out
in the arms. Each arm has a dorsal nerve cord
which is actually a chain of ganglia all the way
down they are.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yes, more than half of an octopus's neurons are in
their arms nerve structures called ganglia, So their arms are
sort of independent, each process what they feel, its sense,
and a lot of how each arm moves. But as
our experts say, that does not mean they have nine brains.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Now. It doesn't mean that they have eight mini brains,
as some media reports suggests, because complex decision making still
requires communication between the arm clusters and the central brain.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So it's not like each arm thinks for itself. But
their whole nervous system is definitely different than ours. It's
more spread out, And this is interesting because it's another
way of putting together a brain.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
What I find so fascinating is despite having such different
neuro architecture, pods are still capable of intelligent traits and
the glimmers of intelligence that we're seeing in humans, chimpanzees, cars, dolphins.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, I mean they diverged five hundred million years ago.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, we're seeing traits that are really familiar to us
when we think about intelligence.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
All Right, when we come back, we'll talk about what
those traits are meaning, what can octopuses actually do. How
smart are they exactly? And then later we'll tackle a
big mystery about octopuses that has puzzled scientists for decades.
To stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back.
(09:50):
We're talking about how smart octopus is sin thephalopods in
general are. And so far we've learned how octopuses evolved
and how that pushed their brain to be smarter. But
here's the thing about octopuses. They're on a completely different
branch of the evolutionary tree of life. Their branch split
away from ours back when we were just a flatworm
(10:12):
with fuzzy eyes. So they built their brain and nervous
system in a totally different way. Did I mention? Their
brain is in the shape of a donut. And the
other thing about octopuses is that more than half of
their nervous system is in their eight arms. Here's our
doctor Tamar Gudnig described it. Here.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
We're talking in about an animal with a nervous system
out of a completely different evolutionary life. This brain is
just in no way related to what our brain looks like,
what a mouse's brain looks like, what a lizard brain
looks like, it's just completely different in terms of how
it's organized. You have about three hundred million neurons in
(10:57):
the octopus that are outside the central nervousness. So if
you look at an octopus arm, octopus arms have hundreds
of suckers. Each one of these suckers has tens of
thousands of sensory cells, so you have taste receptors, chemical receptors,
(11:17):
touch receptors, and even photoreceptors. Then you have skin that
the entire coloration system is based on neural activity. So
every time an octopus flashes color, it's all nerve control,
opening and closing little sacks of pigment.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
They have photoreceptors in their suckers, so they can see
with their tentacles.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
Well, I mean they don't have lenses. I think, so
an octopus arm will respond to a change in lighting
without the animal itself being able to see the change
in lighting.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
So their whole nervous system is more spread out in
some way. They sort of think with their whole body,
not just their brain and stomach like some of us. Okay,
so what can this totally different, almost alien nervous system
of the octopus do? How smart is it? I asked
(12:16):
each of our experts to tell us what octopuses are
known to be able to do, and the first thing
they pointed out was that they're really good at navigating.
What do we know about octopuses and cuttlefish also in
terms of their chronic to skills and abilities.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So in terms of their cognition, I mean, we know
that they demonstrate really advance learning and memory, and they
have exceptional spatial navigation abilities.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
And remember where they were. They can remember how to
get back home, for instance, and then just imagine that
they're going out hunting, so they can go out, hunt,
come back, and then the next day they can say, okay,
I went out that way yesterday, there's not going to
be any food there. I should go out in another direction.
(13:03):
So they're not just remembering where everything is, they're also
remembering where they have been.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
And this, the experts say, demonstrates a very important sign
of intelligence called episodic memory, which means you can remember what, when,
and where something happened. For example, octopuses and cuttlefish can
remember what they ate, where they ate it, and when.
If you set an experiment where say you vary the
(13:32):
kinds of food you put at different times in different
boxes around where they live. In other words, they can
remember personal experiences. Now, the other big sign of how
smart octopuses are is that some of them use tools.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, the footpods in general expert problem solvers, and some
octopuses can even use tools. So the coconut octopus transports
coconuts and other objects as portable shelter, and so it
lives in a very barren type of habitat in Indonesia
called Limbay Strait, where it's just black volcanic sand. There's
(14:12):
not many places to hide. So they will collect a
particular coconut half or a scallop half, and they will
scour the ocean floor to find kind of the perfect
seal so that when a predator lack a barracouter swims by,
they can bury half into the sand and seal that
(14:32):
shell all that coconut.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Oh, they get inside, and then they pull the two
house together. Whoa, they created their own little house. They're
basically building a house their own arvy. Yeah, so that's
tool use. You would count that as tool use.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah, it's tool use because they're using an external object
for a very directed goal and they're manipulating that object.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yeah, if you search for coconut octopus, you see videos
of this octopus carrying around coconut shells and then hiding
in them if they're in danger. Another example of how
smart they are is that octopuses have been seen to play.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
They play interestingly enough.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (15:18):
We set up this experiment out of the aquarium, So
we had an octopus in a tank that had practically
nothing in it. So we gave the octopus a floating
pill bottle and it floated up above the animal and
the water pushed it towards it, and the octopus aimed
a jet of water and set it to the far end,
(15:40):
and it came back wow, And the animal was doing
the equivalent of boutsing the ball. There were two individuals
who did this in one I think was eight times
and another one was twelve times.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
Basically, the idea of play is that you have an
object that there is no purpose in it interacting with it.
There's no food involved, there's no reward involved. It's not
going to give you anything, and still they keep taking
the object, taking it close, throwing away, keep doing it,
throwing it away, and so that is quanta viable of
saying there is a form of play there.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah, octopuses like to play. And there are lots of
other examples of observations of octopuses seeming to solve problems
and show flexible thinking. But one of the problems is
that a lot of these observations are anecdotal, meaning that
people have reported seeing octopuses do these things, but very
few of them have been tested in a scientific experiment.
(16:40):
And that's because octopuses are known to be terrible experimental animals.
They're known to be moody, temperamental. Some even hold grudges
against specific scientists and will squirt them with water whenever
the scientist walks into the room. They're also incredible escape artists,
so it's hard to even keep them in an experiment.
(17:01):
It's like they're too smart to get them to do
what you want them to do for an experiment, but
they're not smart enough that you can communicate or reason
with them. So instead scientists study cuddlefish another cephalopot and
here doctor Chanel did an experiment that show another big
sign of how smart these animals are. Can you describe
(17:23):
that experiment for us that you.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Did so in humans, what the experiments would do is
they would tell the child, here's a marshmallow. You can
eat this marshmallow straight away, but if you wait fifteen minutes,
you can have a second marshmallow. And then they'd leave
the room and they'd see what the children would do.
And this is a really difficult task. I mean, it's
(17:46):
very tempting, especially if you like marshmallows.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
It would be tough for me for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
This is famously called the Stanford marshmallow experiment, named after
an experiment done in the nineteen sixties by psychologist Walter Mitchel
at Well, Stanford, and the essentially boils down to offering
a subject the choice of getting a treat now or
waiting some time to get a better treat. Leader Basically,
(18:16):
do you have self control and can you think about
different possible futures and trade off what feels good now
for what feels better later. It was originally done with kids,
but since then it's been adapted to all kinds of animals,
like monkeys and crows and even rats.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So in rats and pigeons, they're willing to wait a
few seconds and then they kind of give in, whereas
in your larger brain, vertebrates like crows and chimpanzees, they
wait up to two, three, four minutes.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
So then doctor Schnell wondered, what if you do this
experiment with a cephalopart.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
And so I decided to adapt it, and I swapped
out the marshmallows for different types of shrimp because a
marshmallow would not be tempting for a cuttlefish.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Did you try shrimp marshmallows?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
I hold my should off. So essentially I created two
different clear treat boxes. They learned that one the door
would open straight away and the other one the door
would only open after a delay. And the really neat
thing about it is they showed similar coping mechanisms to
what you see in children to kind of cope with
(19:28):
the temptation of that treat. So they'd turn their body
away and not look at the treat, which you see
in a lot of kids, kind of closing their eyes.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
And that's incredible. Did they cry for mommy also or not?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Quite?
Speaker 1 (19:44):
So if they opened one box, they couldn't open the other.
I guess somehow the animal knew that they had to choose.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's right. So I expected the cuttlefish to wait a
few seconds, and I was blown away because there was
differences amongst individuals. But my most patient subject write it
for two and a half minutes.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Wow, and that must be ages for a cuttlefish. So yeah,
cuttlefish are as strategic or as patient as perhaps a
chimpanzee or a five year old kid. Okay, So now
the question is what does this all mean to any
of these examples? Tell us just how smart an octopus is?
(20:24):
Is it smarter than a cat or a monkey or
an elephant. When we come back, we'll tackle that question
and we'll get to one of the biggest mysteries about
octopus intelligence that still puzzle scientists today. So stay with us,
we'll be right back. Welcome back. All right. We're talking
(20:55):
about how smart octopuses are, and so far we've talked
about their evolution, their brain is like, and we talked
about some of the pretty clever things they can do.
Here are two more. The first is that they're not
to work with other species. Here's how doctor Tamark good
Nick describes it.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Another thing that we see is intraspecies cooperation. So there
are some studies that show that octopuses work together with
certain types of fish, and that's something that we've heard
for ages from divers and fishermen, and now we have
more systematic observations of that happening.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
What do you mean they work with fish.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
So there's a lot of species that actually cooperate. You
have one animal that protects and the other animal that hunts.
There are all kinds of cooperations, and we're not completely
sure what each one of them contributes exactly to the cooperation.
Which one is the protection, which one is the hunting.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
You're not sure which one drives the getaway car.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Yes, we're not sure which one's driving the getaway car,
and which one's responsible for cleaning after. It's very new
and it's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Now. The thing about working with other animals is that
lots of species do it. A lot of animals, including
insects and even shrimp, have symbiotic relationships with other animals.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily smart. It could just
be instincts they're born with. But in octopuses, doctor Goodnik
says that's not the case.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
But with octopuses, some of them, you'll see some of them.
You want, so, is this something that the animal picks up? Wait,
this works. This one isn't food. This one's actually useful.
In a way that size of fish would be food,
like everything is for octopus potentially food. But that's not
the type of interaction that they have.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
In other words, it's not something you see in every
octopus of a certain species, which means it's probably something
they're learning to do on the fly. And the other
last example of how smart octopuses are is that apparently
they're pretty good actors. Restarctor alec Schnell.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
So there's another octopus in the same area. It mimics
other animals, and so this is the mimic octopus, and
it will mimic not only the appearance but also the
behavior of other animals, so it might look like a flatfish,
a lionfish, or a sea snake. And what's really interesting
is they tend to do it depending on who's watching.
(23:25):
And so if they come across stams or fish, for example,
they will then bury six of their arms into the
sand and then keep two of their arms out and
take on the pattern of abandoned sea snake and move
their arms like abandoned sea snake.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
No kidding, that's incredible. Yeah, So they can not only
change the patterns, but they can sort of morph into
these other animals. Yes, okay, but now you're probably pretty
convinced that octopuses and cuttlefish are fairly smart. Now we're
going to tackle two questions about that. First is why
(24:01):
are they so smart? As it turns out, this is
a huge puzzle for octopus scientists because octopuses don't live
very long. Here's how doctor Jennifer Mather puts it.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Because the octopus only loves a year or two.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Really wow, yes, so short lived?
Speaker 3 (24:19):
And this always bothers us. Why do they have to
be so smart when they're so short lived?
Speaker 1 (24:25):
But why does it bother us?
Speaker 3 (24:26):
With the normal model you would have would be that
it would be good for you to have a long
life span because there would be lots of things that
you learned and loss of time to learn them. But
if you're not gonna live very long, why learn so much?
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Uh huh?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
So that bothers us?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
It doesn't make sense. So a typical octopus only lives
about a year or two, which makes being that smart
and being able to learn so much seem kind of
a waste. Why would the octopus evolve to be so
smart if it's not gonna live very long? Now that's
an open question. We don't know the answer, but one
(25:03):
theory is that maybe we're just looking at it the
wrong way.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Most species live one to two years. They're like the
rock stars, you know, live fast, die young. And also
they don't have parental care, so they're not learning from kin,
they don't live in groups, they don't learn from individuals
around them. So what we think is that that's probably
a reason why they are such advanced learners, because they
take every opportunity that they can to learn from the
(25:29):
environment around them. They don't have anyone a parental figure, sisters,
brothers that are helping them learn, and because of the
short lifespan, they've just got to do everything really quickly.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Do they have to learn on their own? Yeah? Wow.
So whereas with us and other smartish animals like cats, dogs, crows,
we became smart because we had long lives and lived
in complex societies or groups of animals, the opposite might
have happened in octopuses because they have such short lives.
(26:00):
Because octopuses live on their own, they had to get
smart to survive, which tells you that there's no one
way to get to intelligence. We tend to think of
how smart we are as something special or unique. But
the truth is that intelligence is just one solution to
the problem of staying alive. Meaning intelligence is not something
(26:23):
that's uniquely human or special. It's just something that can
help you solve a problem out in the wild.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
I think intelligence is an involved function of the necessity
to solve the world, right, to get through life. It
doesn't lie in a certain brain area because the brain
areas that have it are so completely different than different animals. Right,
So it's an evolved solution to similar problems, and you
can build up to it in different ways. Yeah, you
(26:50):
obviously life has managed to reach the solution several times.
In a way. It's a product of living.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I guess, which kind of makes you wonder what would
happen if octopuses could live longer?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
I know, I always think about how terrifying or cool
it would be if cephalopods lived for really long. Surely
they'd take over the world.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
You just made me a little scared there, all right.
The last question I asked our experts was how smart
exactly are octopuses and cuddlefish? How do they compare to
other species or even to us. If you had to
compare the intelligence of an octopus to another reference animal.
Would you say something like, it's smarter than a cat,
(27:39):
it's smarter than a dog or a three year old human?
What would you say.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
Then? I would probably politely decline. I mean, I think
it's a very human way of thinking about it. In
a way, what is it smarter than?
Speaker 1 (27:55):
It's not useful to compare.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
No, it's not really useful to compare. They all have
a set of tasks to solve, and each one of
them has a different way of solving them.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
There's many ways to define intelligence. Intelligence is not one thing.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
I think that it's also a bit misleading to rank
their intelligence on a human centered scale. So I like
to say that each species has evolved to be a
master of its own domain. Octopuses excel at things that
a human could never do, complex three dimensional navigation, manipulating
objects with eight different arms, and their cognitive abilities reflect
(28:33):
a very different, but equally I think sophisticated form of intelligence.
They have a taste by touch sensation, so that they
can taste with their suckers when they feel certain objects
or substances. It's kind of like having a tongue and
nose and a fingertip all in one.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
I see and so they're somehow able to process a
lot of sensory information in the way that we could
never even maybe imagine. Okay, so you wouldn't try to
quantify their intelligence relation to other animals, Like if I
ask you, are they smarter than a dog? Are they
smarter than a three year old human?
Speaker 2 (29:07):
I think you can quantify it. I just don't like
to rank them, so, you know, and sometimes I get
that a lot, and I just say, look, you know,
cattlefish can wait for a better trait for two and
a half minutes. How long can your yeah, your three
year old break a second marginal?
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Okay? In the episode, I'm going to let doctor Mather
have the last word. If you had to sum up
fifty years of studying octopuses, what's the thing that you
would most want people to take away?
Speaker 3 (29:36):
That's they're very smart, that there are many ways of
being smart, and that many different animals are pushed in
many different directions by their environment. There's a wonderful varietio there,
and I'd love to learn more about it.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Thanks to all our experts joining us, and thank you
for wrapping your arms around this mystery with us. See
you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Hey Cham,
edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland and audio
(30:18):
engineer and mixer Chandler Mace. And you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll
be back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, Welcome to Science Stuff, a production
of iHeartRadio. I'm Hoorheit cham and today we're asking the
question how smart is an octopus? We've all seen the
videos online of octopuses appearing to do amazing things and
(00:24):
be curious and clever, but it is there real intelligence
behind those eight arms. We're going to talk to three
octopus experts, including an animal psychologist, a National Geographic underwater explorer,
and a neurobiologist. We're going to talk about how octopuses
evolved but their brain is like what they can do.
(00:44):
And then at the end we're going to tackle the
big mystery about why octopuses even exist. So come be
under the sea in an Octopus's science garden as we
answer the question how smart is an octopus?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Everyone, Today we're talking to three experts. First is a
scientist who's been studying octopuses for fifty years, Professor Jennifer Mather.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
I'm recently retired professor in the Department of Psychology, University
of Lethbridge.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
What is your background studying octopuses.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well fifty years. As a kid, I grew up at
the edge of the ocean and taught the animals were
wonderful and fascinating and decided I was going to study
them when I grew up.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
What made you so obsessed with octopuses?
Speaker 3 (01:38):
They're fascinating and wonderful. I love watching the weaving move
and I love watching the patterns that they show on
their skin, and I love trying to figure out what
they're doing with all those.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Arms because it's so different from us.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yes, they're not aliens, they're just different.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
The second expert is doctor Alex Schnell, the National Geographic Explorer.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I am a comparative animal psychologist, and that is just
a fancy word for saying I study animal minds, and
the particular group of animals that I mainly study are
the cephalopods, which include octopus, cuttlefish, and squid. I'm interested
in their capacity to learn and their capacity to remember,
(02:25):
and so I get inspired by some of the studies
that have been conducted in humans and children and adults,
as well as other vertebrate animals, and I try and
adapt those and see if cuttlefish and octopuses can solve them.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
You sort of run the same tests that people have
done on those animals, on cuttlefish and octopuses. Yeah, and finally,
our last expert is doctor Tamar Gudnik.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
I am a researcher no esologists studying sophalo pods of
various types for the past almost twenty years now. Then
my main research animal has been octopus.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Amazing. What does neuroethnologist mean?
Speaker 4 (03:11):
It is the connection between study of behavior and neuroscience,
So how the brain creates behavior?
Speaker 1 (03:20):
All right? The first thing I wanted to ask our
experts was how did octopuses evolve? I mean, they're so
different from us. Where did they come from?
Speaker 2 (03:31):
So? Cephalopods appeared over five hundred million years ago, and
originally their ancestors had shells like the nautilus'es, and then
many of the lineages moved into deep water where they
gradually lost their shells. Really that meant that they tradeed
defense for mobility and flexibility because they're able to be
(03:52):
a bit more agile.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Now, okay, So cephalopods, which include octopuses, cuttlefish, and squids,
branched the evolutionary tree of life about five hundred million
years ago. This was a long time ago, and they
started off as squishy animals with shells, kind of like
the nautilus that then ventured out to the deep sea
(04:14):
where they lost their shell. Why did they lose their shell?
Why weren't shells useful down there?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well, we think that potentially in the darkness, you might
not need a shell to protect yourself, and so it
really was a trade off. Now they're completely soft bodied,
but now they've got more mobility and more flexibility to
move around, I.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
See, and you don't have to carry around a giant.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Shell totally no baggage.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
All right. So in the deep, dark, open ocean, there
weren't as many animals trying to eat them, so they
devolved their shell. But then eventually some of these squishy
pre octopuses moved back to shallow waters. There things got dangerous,
you know.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
We see think that they probably faced intense predator pressures
compared to many other animals because they have no teeth,
no claws, no antlers, no shell, nothing to protect themselves,
and so they really had to use their ability to
blend in like their camouflage or their brains to kind
of one up all the things in the ocean that
(05:20):
might want to eat them.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Interesting, there were boneless filets. Basically, yes, exactly skinless boneless
was it perfect snack?
Speaker 4 (05:30):
And the idea is that they evolved in a sort
of an arrange race with bony fish. There were prey
and predator for each other. And with the speed and
a predatory lifestyle, there was also an increase in intelligence
or cognitive ability.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
And so the pressure was on them to be smarter
in this environment of competition.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Well, I mean, the more you move, the more of
nervous system you need.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
So the history of octopuses is that they were not
lost their shells, but when they came back to shallower waters,
suddenly they were very exposed. And so to survive they
had to get smarter, and that meant upgrading their brains.
So the next thing I asked their experts to do
was to describe and octopus's brain. What can you tell
(06:20):
us about the neurology of octopuses.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
By the definition we use for brain size, which is
brain body ratio, they have a fairly big brain, bigger
than a pigeon, bigger than a laborate.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I see, yes, relative to their size, octopuses are as
the kids say, big brain and This is interesting. That
brain is in the shape of a donut.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So, yeah, cephalopods have really unusual and highly specialized brains.
So their central brain forms like a donut shape that
wraps around their throat. And so they're esophagus what so
all the food that they ate passes through their brain.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
What do they have a donut brain?
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Fascinating.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
It also has a limiting size in terms of what
you can eat because the esophagus goes through the brain.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
It limits the size of things they can eat because
it has to pass through the brain. So they really
think through their food literally. Yeah. The other unique thing
about octopuses is that they have a lot of neurons
and most of those neurons are not in their central brain.
How many neurons or green cells do octopuses have?
Speaker 4 (07:34):
So there are two things. One is how many nerve
cells do they have? That is around five hundred mealsman,
But about more than half of that is actually outside
the brain, so it's outside the central nervous system.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
But the interesting thing about it is three fifths of
their neurons are not in that brain. They are out
in the arms. Each arm has a dorsal nerve cord
which is actually a chain of ganglia all the way
down they are.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yes, more than half of an octopus's neurons are in
their arms nerve structures called ganglia, So their arms are
sort of independent, each process what they feel, its sense,
and a lot of how each arm moves. But as
our experts say, that does not mean they have nine brains.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Now. It doesn't mean that they have eight mini brains,
as some media reports suggests, because complex decision making still
requires communication between the arm clusters and the central brain.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So it's not like each arm thinks for itself. But
their whole nervous system is definitely different than ours. It's
more spread out, And this is interesting because it's another
way of putting together a brain.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
What I find so fascinating is despite having such different
neuro architecture, pods are still capable of intelligent traits and
the glimmers of intelligence that we're seeing in humans, chimpanzees, cars, dolphins.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, I mean they diverged five hundred million years ago.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, we're seeing traits that are really familiar to us
when we think about intelligence.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
All Right, when we come back, we'll talk about what
those traits are meaning, what can octopuses actually do. How
smart are they exactly? And then later we'll tackle a
big mystery about octopuses that has puzzled scientists for decades.
To stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back.
(09:50):
We're talking about how smart octopus is sin thephalopods in
general are. And so far we've learned how octopuses evolved
and how that pushed their brain to be smarter. But
here's the thing about octopuses. They're on a completely different
branch of the evolutionary tree of life. Their branch split
away from ours back when we were just a flatworm
(10:12):
with fuzzy eyes. So they built their brain and nervous
system in a totally different way. Did I mention? Their
brain is in the shape of a donut. And the
other thing about octopuses is that more than half of
their nervous system is in their eight arms. Here's our
doctor Tamar Gudnig described it. Here.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
We're talking in about an animal with a nervous system
out of a completely different evolutionary life. This brain is
just in no way related to what our brain looks like,
what a mouse's brain looks like, what a lizard brain
looks like, it's just completely different in terms of how
it's organized. You have about three hundred million neurons in
(10:57):
the octopus that are outside the central nervousness. So if
you look at an octopus arm, octopus arms have hundreds
of suckers. Each one of these suckers has tens of
thousands of sensory cells, so you have taste receptors, chemical receptors,
(11:17):
touch receptors, and even photoreceptors. Then you have skin that
the entire coloration system is based on neural activity. So
every time an octopus flashes color, it's all nerve control,
opening and closing little sacks of pigment.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
They have photoreceptors in their suckers, so they can see
with their tentacles.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
Well, I mean they don't have lenses. I think, so
an octopus arm will respond to a change in lighting
without the animal itself being able to see the change
in lighting.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
So their whole nervous system is more spread out in
some way. They sort of think with their whole body,
not just their brain and stomach like some of us. Okay,
so what can this totally different, almost alien nervous system
of the octopus do? How smart is it? I asked
(12:16):
each of our experts to tell us what octopuses are
known to be able to do, and the first thing
they pointed out was that they're really good at navigating.
What do we know about octopuses and cuttlefish also in
terms of their chronic to skills and abilities.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So in terms of their cognition, I mean, we know
that they demonstrate really advance learning and memory, and they
have exceptional spatial navigation abilities.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
And remember where they were. They can remember how to
get back home, for instance, and then just imagine that
they're going out hunting, so they can go out, hunt,
come back, and then the next day they can say, okay,
I went out that way yesterday, there's not going to
be any food there. I should go out in another direction.
(13:03):
So they're not just remembering where everything is, they're also
remembering where they have been.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
And this, the experts say, demonstrates a very important sign
of intelligence called episodic memory, which means you can remember what, when,
and where something happened. For example, octopuses and cuttlefish can
remember what they ate, where they ate it, and when.
If you set an experiment where say you vary the
(13:32):
kinds of food you put at different times in different
boxes around where they live. In other words, they can
remember personal experiences. Now, the other big sign of how
smart octopuses are is that some of them use tools.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, the footpods in general expert problem solvers, and some
octopuses can even use tools. So the coconut octopus transports
coconuts and other objects as portable shelter, and so it
lives in a very barren type of habitat in Indonesia
called Limbay Strait, where it's just black volcanic sand. There's
(14:12):
not many places to hide. So they will collect a
particular coconut half or a scallop half, and they will
scour the ocean floor to find kind of the perfect
seal so that when a predator lack a barracouter swims by,
they can bury half into the sand and seal that
(14:32):
shell all that coconut.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Oh, they get inside, and then they pull the two
house together. Whoa, they created their own little house. They're
basically building a house their own arvy. Yeah, so that's
tool use. You would count that as tool use.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah, it's tool use because they're using an external object
for a very directed goal and they're manipulating that object.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yeah, if you search for coconut octopus, you see videos
of this octopus carrying around coconut shells and then hiding
in them if they're in danger. Another example of how
smart they are is that octopuses have been seen to play.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
They play interestingly enough.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (15:18):
We set up this experiment out of the aquarium, So
we had an octopus in a tank that had practically
nothing in it. So we gave the octopus a floating
pill bottle and it floated up above the animal and
the water pushed it towards it, and the octopus aimed
a jet of water and set it to the far end,
(15:40):
and it came back wow, And the animal was doing
the equivalent of boutsing the ball. There were two individuals
who did this in one I think was eight times
and another one was twelve times.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
Basically, the idea of play is that you have an
object that there is no purpose in it interacting with it.
There's no food involved, there's no reward involved. It's not
going to give you anything, and still they keep taking
the object, taking it close, throwing away, keep doing it,
throwing it away, and so that is quanta viable of
saying there is a form of play there.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah, octopuses like to play. And there are lots of
other examples of observations of octopuses seeming to solve problems
and show flexible thinking. But one of the problems is
that a lot of these observations are anecdotal, meaning that
people have reported seeing octopuses do these things, but very
few of them have been tested in a scientific experiment.
(16:40):
And that's because octopuses are known to be terrible experimental animals.
They're known to be moody, temperamental. Some even hold grudges
against specific scientists and will squirt them with water whenever
the scientist walks into the room. They're also incredible escape artists,
so it's hard to even keep them in an experiment.
(17:01):
It's like they're too smart to get them to do
what you want them to do for an experiment, but
they're not smart enough that you can communicate or reason
with them. So instead scientists study cuddlefish another cephalopot and
here doctor Chanel did an experiment that show another big
sign of how smart these animals are. Can you describe
(17:23):
that experiment for us that you.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Did so in humans, what the experiments would do is
they would tell the child, here's a marshmallow. You can
eat this marshmallow straight away, but if you wait fifteen minutes,
you can have a second marshmallow. And then they'd leave
the room and they'd see what the children would do.
And this is a really difficult task. I mean, it's
(17:46):
very tempting, especially if you like marshmallows.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
It would be tough for me for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
This is famously called the Stanford marshmallow experiment, named after
an experiment done in the nineteen sixties by psychologist Walter Mitchel
at Well, Stanford, and the essentially boils down to offering
a subject the choice of getting a treat now or
waiting some time to get a better treat. Leader Basically,
(18:16):
do you have self control and can you think about
different possible futures and trade off what feels good now
for what feels better later. It was originally done with kids,
but since then it's been adapted to all kinds of animals,
like monkeys and crows and even rats.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So in rats and pigeons, they're willing to wait a
few seconds and then they kind of give in, whereas
in your larger brain, vertebrates like crows and chimpanzees, they
wait up to two, three, four minutes.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
So then doctor Schnell wondered, what if you do this
experiment with a cephalopart.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
And so I decided to adapt it, and I swapped
out the marshmallows for different types of shrimp because a
marshmallow would not be tempting for a cuttlefish.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Did you try shrimp marshmallows?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
I hold my should off. So essentially I created two
different clear treat boxes. They learned that one the door
would open straight away and the other one the door
would only open after a delay. And the really neat
thing about it is they showed similar coping mechanisms to
what you see in children to kind of cope with
(19:28):
the temptation of that treat. So they'd turn their body
away and not look at the treat, which you see
in a lot of kids, kind of closing their eyes.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
And that's incredible. Did they cry for mommy also or not?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Quite?
Speaker 1 (19:44):
So if they opened one box, they couldn't open the other.
I guess somehow the animal knew that they had to choose.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's right. So I expected the cuttlefish to wait a
few seconds, and I was blown away because there was
differences amongst individuals. But my most patient subject write it
for two and a half minutes.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Wow, and that must be ages for a cuttlefish. So yeah,
cuttlefish are as strategic or as patient as perhaps a
chimpanzee or a five year old kid. Okay, So now
the question is what does this all mean to any
of these examples? Tell us just how smart an octopus is?
(20:24):
Is it smarter than a cat or a monkey or
an elephant. When we come back, we'll tackle that question
and we'll get to one of the biggest mysteries about
octopus intelligence that still puzzle scientists today. So stay with us,
we'll be right back. Welcome back. All right. We're talking
(20:55):
about how smart octopuses are, and so far we've talked
about their evolution, their brain is like, and we talked
about some of the pretty clever things they can do.
Here are two more. The first is that they're not
to work with other species. Here's how doctor Tamark good
Nick describes it.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Another thing that we see is intraspecies cooperation. So there
are some studies that show that octopuses work together with
certain types of fish, and that's something that we've heard
for ages from divers and fishermen, and now we have
more systematic observations of that happening.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
What do you mean they work with fish.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
So there's a lot of species that actually cooperate. You
have one animal that protects and the other animal that hunts.
There are all kinds of cooperations, and we're not completely
sure what each one of them contributes exactly to the cooperation.
Which one is the protection, which one is the hunting.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
You're not sure which one drives the getaway car.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Yes, we're not sure which one's driving the getaway car,
and which one's responsible for cleaning after. It's very new
and it's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Now. The thing about working with other animals is that
lots of species do it. A lot of animals, including
insects and even shrimp, have symbiotic relationships with other animals.
But that doesn't mean they're necessarily smart. It could just
be instincts they're born with. But in octopuses, doctor Goodnik
says that's not the case.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
But with octopuses, some of them, you'll see some of them.
You want, so, is this something that the animal picks up? Wait,
this works. This one isn't food. This one's actually useful.
In a way that size of fish would be food,
like everything is for octopus potentially food. But that's not
the type of interaction that they have.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
In other words, it's not something you see in every
octopus of a certain species, which means it's probably something
they're learning to do on the fly. And the other
last example of how smart octopuses are is that apparently
they're pretty good actors. Restarctor alec Schnell.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
So there's another octopus in the same area. It mimics
other animals, and so this is the mimic octopus, and
it will mimic not only the appearance but also the
behavior of other animals, so it might look like a flatfish,
a lionfish, or a sea snake. And what's really interesting
is they tend to do it depending on who's watching.
(23:25):
And so if they come across stams or fish, for example,
they will then bury six of their arms into the
sand and then keep two of their arms out and
take on the pattern of abandoned sea snake and move
their arms like abandoned sea snake.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
No kidding, that's incredible. Yeah, So they can not only
change the patterns, but they can sort of morph into
these other animals. Yes, okay, but now you're probably pretty
convinced that octopuses and cuttlefish are fairly smart. Now we're
going to tackle two questions about that. First is why
(24:01):
are they so smart? As it turns out, this is
a huge puzzle for octopus scientists because octopuses don't live
very long. Here's how doctor Jennifer Mather puts it.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Because the octopus only loves a year or two.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Really wow, yes, so short lived?
Speaker 3 (24:19):
And this always bothers us. Why do they have to
be so smart when they're so short lived?
Speaker 1 (24:25):
But why does it bother us?
Speaker 3 (24:26):
With the normal model you would have would be that
it would be good for you to have a long
life span because there would be lots of things that
you learned and loss of time to learn them. But
if you're not gonna live very long, why learn so much?
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Uh huh?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
So that bothers us?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
It doesn't make sense. So a typical octopus only lives
about a year or two, which makes being that smart
and being able to learn so much seem kind of
a waste. Why would the octopus evolve to be so
smart if it's not gonna live very long? Now that's
an open question. We don't know the answer, but one
(25:03):
theory is that maybe we're just looking at it the
wrong way.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Most species live one to two years. They're like the
rock stars, you know, live fast, die young. And also
they don't have parental care, so they're not learning from kin,
they don't live in groups, they don't learn from individuals
around them. So what we think is that that's probably
a reason why they are such advanced learners, because they
take every opportunity that they can to learn from the
(25:29):
environment around them. They don't have anyone a parental figure, sisters,
brothers that are helping them learn, and because of the
short lifespan, they've just got to do everything really quickly.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Do they have to learn on their own? Yeah? Wow.
So whereas with us and other smartish animals like cats, dogs, crows,
we became smart because we had long lives and lived
in complex societies or groups of animals, the opposite might
have happened in octopuses because they have such short lives.
(26:00):
Because octopuses live on their own, they had to get
smart to survive, which tells you that there's no one
way to get to intelligence. We tend to think of
how smart we are as something special or unique. But
the truth is that intelligence is just one solution to
the problem of staying alive. Meaning intelligence is not something
(26:23):
that's uniquely human or special. It's just something that can
help you solve a problem out in the wild.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
I think intelligence is an involved function of the necessity
to solve the world, right, to get through life. It
doesn't lie in a certain brain area because the brain
areas that have it are so completely different than different animals. Right,
So it's an evolved solution to similar problems, and you
can build up to it in different ways. Yeah, you
(26:50):
obviously life has managed to reach the solution several times.
In a way. It's a product of living.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I guess, which kind of makes you wonder what would
happen if octopuses could live longer?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
I know, I always think about how terrifying or cool
it would be if cephalopods lived for really long. Surely
they'd take over the world.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
You just made me a little scared there, all right.
The last question I asked our experts was how smart
exactly are octopuses and cuddlefish? How do they compare to
other species or even to us. If you had to
compare the intelligence of an octopus to another reference animal.
Would you say something like, it's smarter than a cat,
(27:39):
it's smarter than a dog or a three year old human?
What would you say.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
Then? I would probably politely decline. I mean, I think
it's a very human way of thinking about it. In
a way, what is it smarter than?
Speaker 1 (27:55):
It's not useful to compare.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
No, it's not really useful to compare. They all have
a set of tasks to solve, and each one of
them has a different way of solving them.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
There's many ways to define intelligence. Intelligence is not one thing.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
I think that it's also a bit misleading to rank
their intelligence on a human centered scale. So I like
to say that each species has evolved to be a
master of its own domain. Octopuses excel at things that
a human could never do, complex three dimensional navigation, manipulating
objects with eight different arms, and their cognitive abilities reflect
(28:33):
a very different, but equally I think sophisticated form of intelligence.
They have a taste by touch sensation, so that they
can taste with their suckers when they feel certain objects
or substances. It's kind of like having a tongue and
nose and a fingertip all in one.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
I see and so they're somehow able to process a
lot of sensory information in the way that we could
never even maybe imagine. Okay, so you wouldn't try to
quantify their intelligence relation to other animals, Like if I
ask you, are they smarter than a dog? Are they
smarter than a three year old human?
Speaker 2 (29:07):
I think you can quantify it. I just don't like
to rank them, so, you know, and sometimes I get
that a lot, and I just say, look, you know,
cattlefish can wait for a better trait for two and
a half minutes. How long can your yeah, your three
year old break a second marginal?
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Okay? In the episode, I'm going to let doctor Mather
have the last word. If you had to sum up
fifty years of studying octopuses, what's the thing that you
would most want people to take away?
Speaker 3 (29:36):
That's they're very smart, that there are many ways of
being smart, and that many different animals are pushed in
many different directions by their environment. There's a wonderful varietio there,
and I'd love to learn more about it.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Thanks to all our experts joining us, and thank you
for wrapping your arms around this mystery with us. See
you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Hey Cham,
edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland and audio
(30:18):
engineer and mixer Chandler Mace. And you can follow me
on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the
name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to
sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll
be back next Wednesday with another episode.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com