The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

Wow, this is really an excellent book, which in a very unexpected way opens up your mind to a new way of seeing things.  While it is not the best book I have read, it is an unusual one, and it has the possibility of opening up your mind to a new way of looking at the marine world.  You leave the book with a slightly better understanding of how little we really know about our oceans on the one hand and our vast planet on the other.

The subtitle of the book is a bit misleading.  It is definitely surprising, but it is definitely not about the science of consciousness, nor does it explore the mystery of consciousness in a metaphysical way.  What it does do is to go a long way towards debunking the myth of anthropomorphism and make the universality of consciousness the default worldview for the general reader. It persuades the reader not so much overtly but rather by osmosis, telling the story of the author’s many encounters with octopuses Athena and Octavia and Kali and Karma at the New England Aquarium in Boston, and convincing by its very storytelling and ordinariness – by observing and reporting their behavior. Would that this kind of meticulous observation had earned the name behaviorism, rather than what we were stuck with when I was a biology student.