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TED Talks 2019 + Video, Roger Hanlon / The amazing brains and morphing skin of octopuses and other (...)

Roger Hanlon / The amazing brains and morphing skin of octopuses and other (...)

This is a strange and wonderful brain, one that gives rise to an idea of a kind of alternative intelligence on this planet. This is a brain that is formed in a very strange body, one that has the equivalent of small satellite brains distributed throughout that body. How different is it from the human brain? Very different, so it seems, so much so that my colleagues and I are struggling to understand how that brain works. But what I can tell you for certain is that this brain is capable of some amazing things.

So, who does this brain belong to? Well, join me for a little bit of diving into the ocean, where life began, and let's have a look. You may have seen some of this before, but we're behind a coral reef, and there's this rock out there, a lot of sand, fishes swimming around ... And all of a sudden this octopus appears, and now it flashes white, inks in my face and jets away. In slow motion reverse, you see the ring develop around the eye, and then the pattern develops in the skin. And now watch the 3-D texture of the skin change to really create this beautiful, 3-D camouflage.

So there are 25 million color organs called "chromatophores" in the skin, and all those bumps out there, which we call "papillae," and they're all neurally controlled and can change instantaneously. I would argue that dynamic camouflage is a form of "intelligence. " The level of complexity of the skin with fast precision change is really quite astonishing. So what can you do with this skin? Well, let's think a little bit about other things besides camouflage that they can do with their skin. Here you see the mimic octopus and a pattern. All of a sudden, it changes dramatically -- that's signaling, not camouflage. And then it goes back to the normal pattern. Then you see the broadclub cuttlefish showing this passing cloud display as it approaches a crab prey. And finally, you see the flamboyant cuttlefish in camouflage and it can shift instantly to this bright warning display.

What we have here is a sliding scale of expression, a continuum, if you will, between conspicuousness and camouflage. And this requires a lot of control. Well, guess what? Brains are really good for control. The brain of the octopus shown here has 35 lobes to the brain, 80 million tiny cells. And even though that's interesting, what's really odd is that the skin of this animal has many more neurons, as illustrated here, especially in the yellow. There are 300 million neurons in the skin and only 80 million in the brain itself -- four times as many. Now, if you look at that, there's actually one of those little satellite brains and the equivalent of the spinal cord for each of the eight arms. This is a very unusual way to construct a nervous system in a body.

Well, what is that brain good for? That brain has to outwit other big, smart brains that are trying to eat it, and that includes porpoises and seals and barracudas and sharks and even us humans.

So decision-making is one of the things that this brain has to do, and it does a very good job of it. Shown here, you see this octopus perambulating along, and then it suddenly stops and creates that perfect camouflage. And it's really marvelous, because when these animals forage in the wild, they have to make over a hundred camouflaging decisions in a two-hour forage, and they do that twice a day. So, decision-making. They're also figuring out where to go and how to get back home. So it's a decision-making thing. We can test this camouflage, like that cuttlefish you see behind me, where we pull the rug out from under it and give it a checkerboard, and it even uses that strange visual information and does its best to match the pattern with a little ad-libbing.

So other cognitive skills are important, too. The squids have a different kind of smarts, if you will. They have an extremely complex, interesting sex life. They have fighting and flirting and courting and mate-guarding and deception. Sound familiar? (Laughter)

And it's really quite amazing that these animals have this kind of intuitive ability to do these behaviors. Here you see a male and a female. The male, on the left, has been fighting off other males to pair with the female, and now he's showing a dual pattern. He shows courtship and love on her side, fighting on the other. Watch him when she shifts places -- (Laughter) and you see that he has fluidly changed the love-courtship pattern to the side of the female. So this kind of dual signaling simultaneously with a changing behavioral context is really extraordinary. It takes a lot of brain power. Now, another way to look at this is that, hmm, maybe we have 50 million years of evidence for the two-faced male. (Laughter)

All right, let's move on. (Laughter)

An octopus on a coral reef has a tough job in front it to go to so many places, remember and find its den. And they do this extremely well. They have short- and long-term memory, they learn things in three to five trials -- it's a good brain. And the spatial memory is unusually good. They will even end their forage and make a beeline all the way back to their den. The divers watching them are completely lost, but they can get back, so it's really quite refined memory capability. Now, in terms of cognitive skills, look at this sleeping behavior in the cuttlefish. Especially on the right, you see the eye twitching. This is rapid eye movement kind of dreaming that we only thought mammals and birds did. And you see the false color we put in there to see the skin patterning flashing, and this is what's happening a lot. But it's not normal awake behaviors; it's all different. Well, dreaming is when you have memory consolidation, and so this is probably what's happening in the cuttlefish. Now, another form of memory that's really unusual is episodic-like memory. This is something that humans need four years of brain development to do to remember what happened during a particular event, where it happened and when it happened. The "when" part is particularly difficult, and these children can do that. But guess what? We find recently that the wily cuttlefish also has this ability, and in experiments last summer, when you present a cuttlefish with different foods at different times, they have to match that with where it was exactly and when was the last time they saw it. Then they have to guide their foraging to the rate of replenishment of each food type in a different place. Sound complicated? It's so complicated, I hardly understood the experiment. So this is really high-level cognitive processing.

Now, speaking of brains and evolution at the moment, you look on the right, there's the pathway of vertebrate brain evolution, and we all have good brains. I think everyone will acknowledge that. But if you look on the left side, some of the evolutionary pathway outlined here to the octopus, they have both converged, if you will, to complex behaviors and some form of intelligence. The last common denominator in these two lines was 600 million years ago, and it was a worm with very few neurons, so very divergent paths but convergence of complicated behavior.

Here is the fundamental question: Is the brain structure of an octopus basically different down to the tiniest level from the vertebrate line? Now, we don't know the answer, but if it turns out to be yes, then we have a different evolutionary pathway to create intelligence on planet Earth, and one might think that the artificial intelligence community might be interested in those mechanisms. Well, let's talk genetics just for a moment. We have genomes, we have DNA, DNA is transcripted into RNA, RNA translates that into a protein, and that's how we come to be. Well, the cephalopods do it differently. They have big genomes, they have DNA, they transcript it into RNA, but now something dramatically different happens. They edit that RNA at an astronomical weird rate, a hundredfold more than we as humans or other animals do. And it produces scores of proteins. And guess where most of them are for? The nervous system. So perhaps this is an unorthodox way for an animal to evolve behavioral plasticity. This is a lot of conjecture, but it's food for thought. Now, I'd like to share with you for a moment my experience, and using my smarts and that of my colleagues, to try and get this kind of information. We're diving, we can't stay underwater forever because we can't breathe it, so we have to be efficient in what we do. The total sensory immersion into that world is what helps us understand what these animals are really doing, and I have to tell you that it's really an amazing experience to be down there and having this communication with an octopus and a diver when you really begin to understand that this is a thinking, cogitating, curious animal. And this is the kind of thing that really inspires me endlessly.

Let's go back to that smart skin for a few moments. Here's a squid and a camouflage pattern. We zoom down and we see there's beautiful pigments and reflectors. There are the chromatophores opening and closing very quickly. And then, in the next layer of skin, it's quite interesting. The chromatophores are closed, and you see this magical iridescence just come out of the skin. This is also neurally controlled, so it's the combination of the two, as seen here in the high-resolution skin of the cuttlefish, where you get this beautiful pigmentary structural coloration and even the faint blushing that is so beautiful. Well, how can we make use of some of this information? I talked about those skin bumps, the papillae. Here's the giant Australian cuttlefish. It's got smooth skin and a conspicuous pattern. I took five pictures in a row one second apart, and just watch this animal morph -- one, two, three, four, five -- and now I'm a seaweed. And then we can come right back out of it to see the smooth skin and the conspicuousness. So this is really marvelous, morphing skin. You can see it in more detail here. Periscope up, and you've got those beautiful papillae. And then we look in a little more detail, you can see the individual papillae come up, and there are little ridges on there, so it's a papilla on papilla and so forth. Every individual species out there has more than a dozen shapes and sizes of those bumps to create fine-tuned, neurally controlled camouflage.

So now, my colleagues at Cornell, engineers, watched our work and said, "We think we can make some of those. " Because in industry and society, this kind of soft materials under control of shape are really very rare. And they went ahead, worked with us and made the first samples of artificial papillae, soft materials, shown here. And you see them blown up into different shapes, And then you can press your finger on them to see that they're a little bit malleable as they are. And so this is an example of how that might work.

Well, I want to segue from this into the color of fabrics, and I imagine that could have a lot of applications as well. Just look at this kaleidoscope of color of dynamically controlled pigments and reflectors that we see in the cephalopods. We know enough about the mechanics of how they work that we can begin to translate this not only into fabrics but perhaps even into changeable cosmetics. And moreover, there's been the recent discovery of light-sensing molecules in the skin of octopus which may pave the way to, eventually, smart materials that sense and respond on their own. Well, this form of biotechnology, or biomimicry, if you will, could change the way we look at the world even above water. Take, for example, artificial intelligence that might be inspired by the body-distributed brain and behavior of the octopus or the smart skin of a cuttlefish translated into cutting-edge fashion.

Well, how do we get there? Maybe all we have to do is to begin to be a little bit smarter about how smart the cephalopods are.

Thank you.

(Applause)


Roger Hanlon / The amazing brains and morphing skin of octopuses and other (...) Roger Hanlon / Die erstaunlichen Gehirne und die sich wandelnde Haut von Kraken und anderen (...) Roger Hanlon / The amazing brains and morphing skin of octopuses and other (...) Roger Hanlon / El asombroso cerebro y la cambiante piel de los (...) Roger Hanlon / タコなどの驚異的な頭脳と変幻自在の皮膚(...) Roger Hanlon / De verbazingwekkende hersenen en vervormende huid van octopussen en andere (...) Roger Hanlon / Niesamowite mózgi i morfująca skóra ośmiornic i innych (...) Roger Hanlon / Os cérebros espantosos e a pele mutante dos polvos e de outros (...) Роджер Хэнлон / Удивительные мозги и морфинг кожи осьминогов и других (...) Roger Hanlon / Ahtapotların ve diğer canlıların şaşırtıcı beyinleri ve şekil değiştiren derileri (...) Роджер Хенлон / Дивовижний мозок і змінна шкіра восьминогів та інших (...) Roger Hanlon /章鱼和其他动物惊人的大脑和变形的皮肤(...)

This is a strange and wonderful brain, one that gives rise to an idea of a kind of alternative intelligence on this planet. Es handelt sich um ein seltsames und wunderbares Gehirn, das die Vorstellung von einer Art alternativer Intelligenz auf diesem Planeten hervorruft. 这是一个奇怪而奇妙的大脑,它引发了关于这个星球上一种另类智能的想法。 This is a brain that is formed in a very strange body, one that has the equivalent of small satellite brains distributed throughout that body. Es handelt sich um ein Gehirn, das in einem sehr seltsamen Körper gebildet wird, der das Äquivalent von kleinen Satellitengehirnen hat, die in diesem Körper verteilt sind. 这是一个在一个非常奇怪的身体中形成的大脑,相当于遍布整个身体的小型卫星大脑。 How different is it from the human brain? Very different, so it seems, so much so that my colleagues and I are struggling to understand how that brain works. 看起来非常不同,以至于我和我的同事们都在努力理解大脑是如何工作的。 But what I can tell you for certain is that this brain is capable of some amazing things.

So, who does this brain belong to? それで、この脳は誰に属していますか? 那么,这个大脑属于谁呢? Well, join me for a little bit of diving into the ocean, where life began, and let's have a look. さて、人生が始まった海に少し飛び込んで、見てみましょう。 好吧,和我一起潜入生命开始的海洋,让我们看看吧。 You may have seen some of this before, but we're behind a coral reef, and there's this rock out there, a lot of sand, fishes swimming around ... And all of a sudden this octopus appears, and now it flashes white, inks in my face and jets away. Sie haben das vielleicht schon mal gesehen, aber wir sind hinter einem Korallenriff, und da ist dieser Felsen, viel Sand, Fische schwimmen herum ... Und plötzlich taucht dieser Oktopus auf, und jetzt blinkt er weiß, tuscht in mein Gesicht und düst davon. これまでに見たことがあるかもしれませんが、私たちはサンゴ礁の後ろにいて、そこにはこの岩があり、たくさんの砂、魚が泳いでいます...そして突然このタコが現れ、今では白く点滅します、私の顔にインクがあり、飛び散ります。 你可能以前见过一些这样的情况,但我们在珊瑚礁后面,那里有一块岩石,有很多沙子,鱼在周围游动......突然这只章鱼出现了,现在它闪烁着白色的光,墨水溅到我脸上,然后喷射而去。 In slow motion reverse, you see the ring develop around the eye, and then the pattern develops in the skin. スローモーションリバースでは、目の周りにリングが発達し、次に皮膚にパターンが発達します。 在慢动作反转中,您会看到环在眼睛周围形成,然后图案在皮肤中形成。 And now watch the 3-D texture of the skin change to really create this beautiful, 3-D camouflage. そして今、肌の3Dテクスチャが変化するのを見て、この美しい3Dカモフラージュを実際に作成します。 现在,观看皮肤的 3D 纹理变化,真正创建出这种美丽的 3D 迷彩。

So there are 25 million color organs called "chromatophores" in the skin, and all those bumps out there, which we call "papillae," and they're all neurally controlled and can change instantaneously. つまり、皮膚には「色素胞」と呼ばれる2500万の色の器官があり、それらはすべて「乳頭」と呼ばれる隆起であり、それらはすべて神経制御されており、瞬時に変化する可能性があります。 皮肤中有 2500 万个颜色器官,称为“色素细胞”,而所有这些凸起,我们称为“乳头”,它们都是由神经控制的,可以瞬间改变。 I would argue that dynamic camouflage is a form of "intelligence. ダイナミックなカモフラージュは「知性」の一形態であると私は主張します。 我认为动态伪装是“智能”的一种形式。 " The level of complexity of the skin with fast precision change is really quite astonishing. " Der Grad der Komplexität der Haut mit schnellem Präzisionswechsel ist wirklich sehr erstaunlich. 「迅速な精度の変化を伴う皮膚の複雑さのレベルは、本当に驚くべきものです。 “皮肤的复杂程度和快速的精度变化确实相当惊人。 So what can you do with this skin? では、この肌で何ができるでしょうか? Well, let's think a little bit about other things besides camouflage that they can do with their skin. さて、カモフラージュ以外に、肌でできることについて少し考えてみましょう。 好吧,让我们想一下除了伪装之外他们还可以用皮肤做的其他事情。 Here you see the mimic octopus and a pattern. Hier sehen Sie die Krakenmimik und ein Muster. 在这里您可以看到模仿章鱼和图案。 All of a sudden, it changes dramatically -- that's signaling, not camouflage. 突然之间,它发生了巨大的变化——这是信号,而不是伪装。 And then it goes back to the normal pattern. そして、通常のパターンに戻ります。 然后又回到正常模式。 Then you see the broadclub cuttlefish showing this passing cloud display as it approaches a crab prey. 次に、ブロードクラブのイカがカニの獲物に近づくと、この通過する雲の表示を示しています。 Потім ви бачите, як каракатиця булава показує це хмарне зображення, що проходить, коли вона наближається до жертви краба. 然后你会看到阔叶乌贼在接近螃蟹猎物时展示出这种掠过的云彩。 And finally, you see the flamboyant cuttlefish in camouflage and it can shift instantly to this bright warning display. 最后,您会看到伪装的华丽乌贼,它可以立即转变为明亮的警告显示。

What we have here is a sliding scale of expression, a continuum, if you will, between conspicuousness and camouflage. Wir haben es hier mit einer gleitenden Skala des Ausdrucks zu tun, einem Kontinuum, wenn man so will, zwischen Auffälligkeit und Tarnung. 我们这里所拥有的是一种表达的滑动尺度,如果你愿意的话,是一个介于引人注目和伪装之间的连续体。 And this requires a lot of control. Well, guess what? Brains are really good for control. The brain of the octopus shown here has 35 lobes to the brain, 80 million tiny cells. 图中所示的章鱼大脑有 35 个脑叶、8000 万个微小细胞。 And even though that's interesting, what's really odd is that the skin of this animal has many more neurons, as illustrated here, especially in the yellow. 尽管这很有趣,但真正奇怪的是这种动物的皮肤有更多的神经元,如图所示,尤其是黄色的。 There are 300 million neurons in the skin and only 80 million in the brain itself -- four times as many. 皮肤中有 3 亿个神经元,而大脑本身只有 8000 万个,是后者的四倍。 Now, if you look at that, there's actually one of those little satellite brains and the equivalent of the spinal cord for each of the eight arms. Wenn man sich das anschaut, gibt es für jeden der acht Arme eines dieser kleinen Satellitengehirne und das Äquivalent des Rückenmarks. 现在,如果你看一下,八只手臂实际上都有一个小卫星大脑和相当于脊髓的东西。 This is a very unusual way to construct a nervous system in a body.

Well, what is that brain good for? That brain has to outwit other big, smart brains that are trying to eat it, and that includes porpoises and seals and barracudas and sharks and even us humans. 这个大脑必须智胜其他试图吃掉它的大而聪明的大脑,其中包括海豚、海豹、梭鱼和鲨鱼,甚至我们人类。

So decision-making is one of the things that this brain has to do, and it does a very good job of it. 因此,决策是大脑必须做的事情之一,而且它做得非常好。 Shown here, you see this octopus perambulating along, and then it suddenly stops and creates that perfect camouflage. 如图所示,您会看到这只章鱼在漫步,然后它突然停下来并创造出完美的伪装。 And it's really marvelous, because when these animals forage in the wild, they have to make over a hundred camouflaging decisions in a two-hour forage, and they do that twice a day. І це справді чудово, тому що, коли ці тварини шукають їжу в дикій природі, їм доводиться приймати понад сотню маскувальних рішень за двогодинний пошук їжі, і вони роблять це двічі на день. 这真的很奇妙,因为当这些动物在野外觅食时,它们必须在两个小时的觅食时间内做出一百多个伪装决定,而且它们每天要做两次。 So, decision-making. They're also figuring out where to go and how to get back home. 他们还在考虑去哪里以及如何回家。 So it's a decision-making thing. 所以这是一个决策的事情。 We can test this camouflage, like that cuttlefish you see behind me, where we pull the rug out from under it and give it a checkerboard, and it even uses that strange visual information and does its best to match the pattern with a little ad-libbing. 我们可以测试这种迷彩,就像你在我身后看到的那只乌贼一样,我们从它下面拉出地毯并给它一个棋盘,它甚至使用那种奇怪的视觉信息,并尽力用一点广告来匹配图案-解放。

So other cognitive skills are important, too. 因此其他认知技能也很重要。 The squids have a different kind of smarts, if you will. They have an extremely complex, interesting sex life. 他们的性生活极其复杂、有趣。 They have fighting and flirting and courting and mate-guarding and deception. 他们有打斗、调情、求爱、保护配偶和欺骗等行为。 Sound familiar? (Laughter)

And it's really quite amazing that these animals have this kind of intuitive ability to do these behaviors. 这些动物具有做出这些行为的直觉能力,这确实非常令人惊奇。 Here you see a male and a female. The male, on the left, has been fighting off other males to pair with the female, and now he's showing a dual pattern. Das Männchen auf der linken Seite hat sich gegen andere Männchen durchgesetzt, um sich mit dem Weibchen zu paaren, und jetzt zeigt es ein doppeltes Muster. 左边的雄性一直在与其他雄性进行斗争以与雌性配对,现在它表现出双重模式。 He shows courtship and love on her side, fighting on the other. 他在她这边表现出求爱和爱意,在另一边则表现出战斗。 Watch him when she shifts places --    (Laughter)   and you see that he has fluidly changed the love-courtship pattern to the side of the female. So this kind of dual signaling simultaneously with a changing behavioral context is really extraordinary. 因此,这种与不断变化的行为环境同时发出的双重信号确实是非同寻常的。 It takes a lot of brain power. Now, another way to look at this is that, hmm, maybe we have 50 million years of evidence for the two-faced male. Eine andere Sichtweise ist, dass wir vielleicht 50 Millionen Jahre lang Beweise für das zweigesichtige Männchen haben. (Laughter)

All right, let's move on. (Laughter)

An octopus on a coral reef has a tough job in front it to go to so many places, remember and find its den. 珊瑚礁上的章鱼面临着一项艰巨的任务,它要走遍很多地方,记住并找到它的巢穴。 And they do this extremely well. 他们在这方面做得非常好。 They have short- and long-term memory, they learn things in three to five trials -- it's a good brain. Sie haben ein Kurz- und Langzeitgedächtnis, sie lernen Dinge in drei bis fünf Versuchen - das ist ein gutes Gehirn. 他们有短期和长期记忆,他们通过三到五次尝试就能学到东西——这是一个很好的大脑。 And the spatial memory is unusually good. 而且空间记忆力异常的好。 They will even end their forage and make a beeline all the way back to their den. 它们甚至会结束觅食,径直返回巢穴。 The divers watching them are completely lost, but they can get back, so it's really quite refined memory capability. Die Taucher, die sie beobachten, sind völlig verloren, aber sie können zurückkehren, es handelt sich also um eine ziemlich raffinierte Gedächtnisleistung. Now, in terms of cognitive skills, look at this sleeping behavior in the cuttlefish. Was die kognitiven Fähigkeiten betrifft, so können Sie sich das Schlafverhalten des Tintenfisches ansehen. 现在,从认知技能的角度来看,看看墨鱼的这种睡眠行为。 Especially on the right, you see the eye twitching. 尤其是在右边,你会看到眼睛在抽搐。 This is rapid eye movement kind of dreaming that we only thought mammals and birds did. 这是一种快速眼球运动的梦,我们只认为哺乳动物和鸟类会做这种梦。 And you see the false color we put in there to see the skin patterning flashing, and this is what's happening a lot. Und Sie sehen die Falschfarbe, die wir dort eingefügt haben, um die Hautmuster blinken zu sehen, und genau das passiert häufig. 你会看到我们放入其中的假颜色,以看到皮肤图案闪烁,这就是经常发生的情况。 But it's not normal awake behaviors; it's all different. Aber es ist kein normales waches Verhalten, es ist alles anders. 但这不是正常的清醒行为;一切都不同了。 Well, dreaming is when you have memory consolidation, and so this is probably what's happening in the cuttlefish. Nun, beim Träumen konsolidiert sich das Gedächtnis, und genau das passiert wahrscheinlich im Tintenfisch. 嗯,做梦是当你巩固记忆的时候,所以这可能就是乌贼身上发生的事情。 Now, another form of memory that's really unusual is episodic-like memory. Eine andere Form des Gedächtnisses, die wirklich ungewöhnlich ist, ist das episodische Gedächtnis. 现在,另一种非常不寻常的记忆形式是情景记忆。 This is something that humans need four years of brain development to do to remember what happened during a particular event, where it happened and when it happened. 这是人类需要四年大脑发育才能记住特定事件期间发生的事情、发生地点和时间的事情。 The "when" part is particularly difficult, and these children can do that. “何时”部分特别困难,而这些孩子可以做到。 But guess what? We find recently that the wily cuttlefish also has this ability, and in experiments last summer, when you present a cuttlefish with different foods at different times, they have to match that with where it was exactly and when was the last time they saw it. 我们最近发现狡猾的乌贼也有这种能力,在去年夏天的实验中,当你在不同的时间给墨鱼提供不同的食物时,它们必须将其与它的确切位置以及它们最后一次看到它的时间相匹配。 Then they have to guide their foraging to the rate of replenishment of each food type in a different place. 然后它们必须根据不同地点每种食物类型的补充速度来指导它们的觅食。 Sound complicated? It's so complicated, I hardly understood the experiment. So this is really high-level cognitive processing.

Now, speaking of brains and evolution at the moment, you look on the right, there's the pathway of vertebrate brain evolution, and we all have good brains. 现在,说到大脑和进化,你看右边,这是脊椎动物大脑进化的途径,我们都有好的大脑。 I think everyone will acknowledge that. 我想每个人都会承认这一点。 But if you look on the left side, some of the evolutionary pathway outlined here to the octopus, they have both converged, if you will, to complex behaviors and some form of intelligence. 但如果你看左边,这里概述的章鱼的一些进化途径,如果你愿意的话,它们都趋同于复杂的行为和某种形式的智力。 The last common denominator in these two lines was 600 million years ago, and it was a worm with very few neurons, so very divergent paths but convergence of complicated behavior. 这两条线的最后一个共同点是六亿年前,它是一种神经元很少的蠕虫,因此路径非常不同,但复杂行为的收敛。

Here is the fundamental question: Is the brain structure of an octopus basically different down to the tiniest level from the vertebrate line? 这是一个基本问题:章鱼的大脑结构与脊椎动物的大脑结构是否有根本的不同? Now, we don't know the answer, but if it turns out to be yes, then we have a different evolutionary pathway to create intelligence on planet Earth, and one might think that the artificial intelligence community might be interested in those mechanisms. 现在,我们不知道答案,但如果结果是肯定的,那么我们就有了一条不同的进化途径在地球上创造智能,人们可能会认为人工智能界可能对这些机制感兴趣。 Well, let's talk genetics just for a moment. We have genomes, we have DNA, DNA is transcripted into RNA, RNA translates that into a protein, and that's how we come to be. 我们有基因组,我们有DNA,DNA被转录成RNA,RNA将其翻译成蛋白质,这就是我们的形成方式。 Well, the cephalopods do it differently. 嗯,头足类动物的做法不同。 They have big genomes, they have DNA, they transcript it into RNA, but now something dramatically different happens. 它们有很大的基因组,它们有 DNA,它们将其转录成 RNA,但现在发生了截然不同的事情。 They edit that RNA at an astronomical weird rate, a hundredfold more than we as humans or other animals do. 它们以惊人的速度编辑 RNA,比我们人类或其他动物快一百倍。 And it produces scores of proteins. 它会产生大量的蛋白质。 And guess where most of them are for? 猜猜它们大部分是用来做什么的? The nervous system. 神经系统。 So perhaps this is an unorthodox way for an animal to evolve behavioral plasticity. 因此,这也许是动物进化行为可塑性的一种非正统方式。 This is a lot of conjecture, but it's food for thought. Das sind zwar nur Mutmaßungen, aber sie regen zum Nachdenken an. 这虽然是很多猜测,但却值得深思。 Now, I'd like to share with you for a moment my experience, and using my smarts and that of my colleagues, to try and get this kind of information. 现在,我想与大家分享一下我的经验,并利用我和我的同事的聪明才智,尝试获取此类信息。 We're diving, we can't stay underwater forever because we can't breathe it, so we have to be efficient in what we do. 我们在潜水,我们不能永远呆在水下,因为我们无法呼吸,所以我们必须高效工作。 The total sensory immersion into that world is what helps us understand what these animals are really doing, and I have to tell you that it's really an amazing experience to be down there and having this communication with an octopus and a diver when you really begin to understand that this is a thinking, cogitating, curious animal. 完全沉浸在这个世界中可以帮助我们了解这些动物真正在做什么,我必须告诉你,当你真正开始了解章鱼和潜水员时,在水下与章鱼和潜水员进行交流真是一次奇妙的经历。了解这是一种会思考、深思熟虑、好奇的动物。 And this is the kind of thing that really inspires me endlessly.

Let's go back to that smart skin for a few moments. Here's a squid and a camouflage pattern. We zoom down and we see there's beautiful pigments and reflectors. There are the chromatophores opening and closing very quickly. And then, in the next layer of skin, it's quite interesting. The chromatophores are closed, and you see this magical iridescence just come out of the skin. This is also neurally controlled, so it's the combination of the two, as seen here in the high-resolution skin of the cuttlefish, where you get this beautiful pigmentary structural coloration and even the faint blushing that is so beautiful. Well, how can we make use of some of this information? Wie können wir nun einige dieser Informationen nutzen? I talked about those skin bumps, the papillae. Here's the giant Australian cuttlefish. It's got smooth skin and a conspicuous pattern. Es hat eine glatte Haut und ein auffälliges Muster. I took five pictures in a row one second apart, and just watch this animal morph -- one, two, three, four, five -- and now I'm a seaweed. And then we can come right back out of it to see the smooth skin and the conspicuousness. So this is really marvelous, morphing skin. You can see it in more detail here. Periscope up, and you've got those beautiful papillae. Periskop hoch, und du hast diese schönen Papillen. And then we look in a little more detail, you can see the individual papillae come up, and there are little ridges on there, so it's a papilla on papilla and so forth. Every individual species out there has more than a dozen shapes and sizes of those bumps to create fine-tuned, neurally controlled camouflage.

So now, my colleagues at Cornell, engineers, watched our work and said, "We think we can make some of those. " Because in industry and society, this kind of soft materials under control of shape are really very rare. And they went ahead, worked with us and made the first samples of artificial papillae, soft materials, shown here. And you see them blown up into different shapes, And then you can press your finger on them to see that they're a little bit malleable as they are. And so this is an example of how that might work.

Well, I want to segue from this into the color of fabrics, and I imagine that could have a lot of applications as well. Just look at this kaleidoscope of color of dynamically controlled pigments and reflectors that we see in the cephalopods. We know enough about the mechanics of how they work that we can begin to translate this not only into fabrics but perhaps even into changeable cosmetics. And moreover, there's been the recent discovery of light-sensing molecules in the skin of octopus which may pave the way to, eventually, smart materials that sense and respond on their own. Well, this form of biotechnology, or biomimicry, if you will, could change the way we look at the world even above water. Take, for example, artificial intelligence that might be inspired by the body-distributed brain and behavior of the octopus or the smart skin of a cuttlefish translated into cutting-edge fashion.

Well, how do we get there? Maybe all we have to do is to begin to be a little bit smarter about how smart the cephalopods are.

Thank you.

(Applause)