Bipedal Octopus bimaculoides is naturally gifted with a troubled and aggressive character. They are not only misanthropic, but also cynical: they show love and care for their neighbors only during mating. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have created a pro-sociality miracle for the mollusks by drugging them with MDMA. What does this say about humans?
Clams high
For all their asociality, the chemistry of social behavior in octopuses is fine: nature has rewarded cephalopods with a system with serotonin, an evolutionarily ancient molecule responsible for well-being, feelings of happiness, and prosociality. Having analyzed the genome of Octopus bimaculoides, the researchers found an interesting thing: the gene that encodes proteins that move serotonin in the brain is frighteningly similar to the analogous human SERT gene.
This is how the idea of immersing octopuses in the magical universe of ecstasy was born. The drug was not chosen for its love of magic and raves: the path of MDMA to the brain goes through the serotonin transporters, and the concentration of this neurotransmitter in certain parts of the brain increases.
That is why the "hug drug" cleverly manipulates perception: a teenager crawling into a club under the influence of ecstasy does not notice the displeased face of the face control, but immediately sees the happy face of his partner. MDMA reduces his ability to read negative stimuli and increases the accuracy of decoding positive ones.
By increasing plasma levels of oxytocin and prolactin, the drug makes teenagers more open and trusting, enhances their empathy and prosocial behavior in general.
The above works for different mammals, such as mice and rats. There was no certainty about octopuses, because they have a completely different brain architecture. More precisely, their brains: the mollusk has no cerebral cortex, but instead of a localized center there is a decentralized system with separate headquarters for each tentacle.
Of all invertebrates, octopuses are the most behaviorally advanced and intelligent (pass mazes, solve puzzles, recognize figures and people).
Gul Dolen MD, PhD, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who led the experiment, notes that the brain of an octopus is closer to that of a snail than a mammal: we are separated from them by as much as half a billion years of evolution.
To test how the biochemistry of sociality works in Octopus bimaculoides, scientists did not shove colored pills into the cephalopods, but placed them in a miniature bath of MDMA and literally soaked them in loveliness (ten minutes of water treatment for an octopus is like ten minutes of inhalation for a human).
After the bath, the test subjects were sent for 30 minutes to an aquarium with three compartments for free wandering. In one of them was placed another octopus, placed in a plastic bottle or orchid pot, to avoid potential struggle. In the other chamber was a decoy: similarly encased in a bottle or pot were attractive objects, among which the humorous researchers placed not only colored fillers, but also statuettes of galactic heroes like Chewbacca.
After MDMA dousing, the octopuses spent the same amount of time in the neutral room as they did without doping, but the stay in the other compartments changed dramatically.
They were much more interested in new subjects, which is related to another effect of the drug: by stimulating synaptic plasticity and affecting BDNF (the gene that supports neuronal development), it promotes learning.
The time spent with relatives has also generally increased, but not only that - the quality of communication has also changed.
Normally, octopuses don't come within arm's length of their fellows, but under MDMA, they shifted to active ventral contact: groping, studying and exploring others.
Scientists hypothesize that the cephalopods sociability, unless they urgently need to breed, is suppressed out of necessity, and MDMA simply releases the blocked neural mechanisms. Not only pro-social ones, but also those responsible for happiness (it's all about serotonin): in the trip, the clams ecstatically spread their tentacles, performed aquatic ballet maneuvers and got high from smells and sounds.
Only the innate sexism of Octopus bimaculoides has not changed: the octopus sought females in the social cell fervently, but if a male turned out to be there, they preferred Chewbacca to him.
People are in turmoil
We are used to the fact that the more scientists dig into the brain, the more prosaic the picture of our inner world becomes: emotions = limbic system work, passionate love = explosion of hormones and neurotransmitters, and sacral love (until death separates us) can be easily explained by the tone of dopamine system, adjoining nucleus, ventral middle brain cover and ventral pallidum.
Scientific article headlines along the lines of "scientists measured happiness" seeming like pure heresy can easily be adequately translated as "scientists measured serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine levels"
The experiment with octopuses, which have no cerebral cortex and a complex reward system, showed that the mechanism of sociality is ridiculously simple and boils down to a biochemical «click».
But not only that. The paths of mammals and cephalopods diverged 500 million years ago. During that time, a long and intricate evolutionary path seemed to lead us to a highly evolved sociality, and Mark Zuckerberg to his millions. Now it turns out that making us a social species is not an evolutionary goal at all, or even an achievement.
Today, some evolutionary species show as much enthusiasm for the social as we do: ants are great at slavery and can commit sacrificial suicide in case of danger to their fellows; bonobo monkeys are good at obstetrics, elephants are gods of empathy and probably even know what death is (and as psychologist Ernest Becker writes, all human civilization may be just a mechanism of psychological defense against the awareness of their own mortality).
Most animals and insects are superior to homo sapiens in terms of simple everyday communication: they are capable of multi-caliber communication (ants, unlike us, communicate audiovisually, haptically and chemically) and interspecies communication (dogs understand us, but we do not understand them).
Research in genetics has convinced the world that the stereotypical evolutionary ruler "from lesser to greater" is obsolete, and it is better to visualize evolution as a circle, where the proud male homo sapiens is only part of the whole.
Evolution really has no goal or plan, and all natural expediency is just a cleverly arranged optical illusion. As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins likes to remind us, there are three basic mechanisms that create one seemingly unimaginable possibility out of millions of possibilities: variability, natural selection, and heredity.
Variability opens the door to random change: the offspring of any creature is a priori different from its parents. If such a random change turns out to be a competitive advantage, the creature is not exterminated by the environment and survives to the reproductive period, and heredity fixes the random trait at the population level.
Intelligent and highly social in nature, we are just a set of well-assembled switches, even when it comes to complex interactions with each other and with ourselves.
Consciousness, some say, is also nothing more than an emergent property of the complex brain. A beautiful outcome of an aimless fermentation of coincidences.
