Eight arms, eight talents!
"If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over."
— Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Cephalopods (octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish) are rather bizarre animals: they look positively alien, yet they're also quite high in intelligence. This is made possible by their nervous system, a network of scattered neuron clusters across their body (essentially multiple "brains" working in unison with the main one), which allows them to solve problems that are impossible for most other animals (especially for escaping tight areas). This juxtaposition of an unfamiliar shape with humanlike familiarity is not lost by humans, with cephalopods equated to hidden wisdom.
Across cultures, cephalopods symbolize intelligence and emotional insight, with fictional examples portraying cephalopod IQ (or EQ) often quite accurately. In works, cephalopod characters may be portrayed as ingenious, clever, and enlightened. Some cephalopods might act in a sophisticated or educational manner to showcase their vast intelligence. More light-hearted takes opt to characterize them as crafty pranksters. The negative side of this trope is that it can portray cephalopods as cold, deceptive, and logical. This can either illustrate their alien nature or, conversely, echo humans themselves, as a reminder of the cruelty that comes with sapience.
This trope also has roots in the very reason why cephalopods are called cephalopods: their large, prominent heads. Popular culture likes to associate big heads in general with greater intelligence, and the mantles of cephalopods — especially octopuses — give the impression of enlarged craniums, so people naturally assume that animals having such bulbous heads must be equally brainy.note As such, if a work depicts a cerebral octopus or octopus-themed character, expect their cranium to be the most emphasized part of their visual design.
Note that cephalopod-like aliens do not immediately qualify for this trope. Since sea life aesthetic is heavily associated with extraterrestrial civilizations, aliens looking like octopuses and having high intelligence are equally likely to be a coincidence as they are likely intentional. Because of this, only cases where cephalopodic intelligence is indicated to be a primary influence on the race's depiction apply here. All other examples go to Octopoid Aliens.
Compare Brainy Pig, Clever Crows, Cunning Like a Fox, Intelligent Primate, The Owl-Knowing One, Smart Cetaceans, and Wise Serpent for other animals that represent intelligence. Compare Stealthy Cephalopod, which portrays the cunning aspect through stealthiness. May overlap with Tentacled Terror if the octopus's intellect is played for horror.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Squid Girl: The titular character is a humanoid squid, and while it's never established if she took on a human form, or if she's a Puppeteer Parasite piloting a human body, what is established is her intellect. She can solve complicated equations with a speed that has alien hunter Cindy Campbell amazed, and the Book Dumb Eiko seething in envy. And she is capable of learning and mastering new languages quickly, which Chizuru notes when the family is trying to help Takeru learn English.
Fan Works
- Sword and Claw has a kraken for the villain of its underwater arc. This particular kraken is intelligent and can organize an army of sea monsters to attack humans.
Film — Animated
- Finding Dory: Hank is an octopusnote who is portrayed as very crafty, such as by being an Escape Artist who can use his camouflage abilities to hide and disguise himself in a variety of ways. He's even smart enough to operate vehicles, as shown with a stroller and even a truck.
- Penguins of Madagascar: Zigzagged with the octopuses, who can survive on land and operate complex machinery. The leader, Dave, is a goofy and Laughably Evil octopus who's not only a brilliant Mad Scientist, but he's well-versed in the human tongue, which allows him to pass as one under the disguise of an accomplished scientist named Dr. Octavius Brine. His unintelligible henchmen showcase a variety of talents, though any intelligence they share with their boss is never confirmed.
Film — Live-Action
- My Octopus Teacher: The film is a documentary about a diver befriending a wild octopus. The documentary highlights the octopus's craftiness and insight throughout the film, particularly in one scene when the octopus manages to escape a shark's jaw by clinging to the shark's dorsal fin (with the shark unaware).
- Remarkably Bright Creatures: The narrator of the story is Marcellus, an East Pacific red octopus at a Washington aquarium. To Marcellus, humans are less intelligent and quite primitive, but while he's initially condescending of them, he is highly observant and receptive to the custodian Tova, with whom he forms a friendship after she shows him compassion. Aware that he's dying from old age, Marcellus ventures out of his tank several times to investigate the source of Tova's loneliness as his final act of goodwill.
Literature
- Children of Ruin: Octopuses infected with the uplift-virus became a species of Ditzy Geniuses due to their Bizarre Alien Psychology: their brains conceive ideas, and their tentacles carry them out as a subconscious, semi-autonomous process. This leads to them learning to build spacecraft essentially on reflex, then re-building them mid-flight because they suddenly had an idea for improvement.
- Meg Langslow Mysteries: Terns of Endearment: In the Show Within a Show, The Spymaster of the werebeast kingdom, who keeps things running, transforms into a squid.
- The Mountain in the Sea: The A-plot revolves around the octopuses of the remote Con Dao archipelago off Vietnam, which the DIANIMA corporation believes to have achieved full sapience, with culture, tools, and language. Ha theorizes that overfishing and pollution forced them to adapt greater and greater intelligence to survive, and it's clear that as she studies them and tries to accomplish First Contact, the octopuses are studying her right back.
- Nexus Nine: Octopuses were originally an advanced civilization that existed millions of years before humanity. When humans started to uplift other species into sapience, the octopuses uploaded themselves into the nexus pathways they built.
- Rainbow Fish: The titular character goes to a wise octopus to learn what he needs to do to gain friends.
Live-Action TV
- The Future is Wild:
- The Swampus of Bengal Swamp is an amphibious octopus that's fiercely protective of its offspring raised inland. When they reach a certain age, infant Swampus will quickly learn how to dive into the water to join their parent.
- Played with for the terrestrial cephalopod species of the Northern Forest. The Squibbons, acrobatic gibbon-like cephalopods, play this straight, as they've adapted to living in trees and retain their ancestors' highly inventive minds to fill the niche of primates. Also, it's heavily implied that they'll become the next sapient race. However, the Megasquids, who evolved into heavyset apex predators in exchange for their intelligence, have become sluggish and elephant-like, with their dimwittedness exploited by opportunistic organisms.
- Resident Alien: Cephalopods are genetic relatives of Harry's species, due to a meteor that landed on Earth long ago carrying alien DNA that infused local lifeforms, such as octopuses. The octopus Harry meets is not only intelligent, but has Harry's Psychic Powers, allowing him to speak telepathically and heal amnesia.
- The Twilight Zone (2019): In "Eight", the titular octopus 8 is a very dark example. It's a large, preternaturally intelligent octopus that can operate with peak stealth and efficiency, to the point it can hack into the lab's computer to steal genetic information. 8 ultimately escapes into the sea with the genetic code to help it and all other cephalopods to evolve and adapt to dry land, whereupon they'll invade and eliminate humanity and take over as the dominant life form.
Podcasts
- The Books of Thoth: The episode "Paleontology Conference" follows a civilization of intelligent terrestrial squids 100 million years in the future who have replaced humanity as the next sapient life. The episode implies that most marine life recolonized the land after humanity destroyed itself and most terrestrial organisms, in a nuclear war.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The krakens resemble enormous squids, but have genius-level intellects, potent sorcerous abilities, and a raging god complex, which leads to them spinning elaborate plans of conquest and destruction. They are sometimes hinted to have originated on other planes, and often worship evil gods or Demon Lords and Archdevils with a tie to water, such as Dagon.
- The spin-off game Pathfinder has the Devilfish; 10-12ft long vampire squid-like cephalopods, said to have been created when the blood of Dagon mingled with the blood of a powerful kraken queen during a titanic fight to the death. They are ruthless, sadistic, and highly intelligent predators.
- Magic: The Gathering: The Krakens
, a race of cephalopod-like sea monsters, are aligned with the Blue mana. In keeping with Blue's focus on intelligence, knowledge, and the mind, krakens are sometimes portrayed as quite intelligent. Zendikar's krakens are reclusive, contemplative beings dedicated to plumbing the many secrets of their world's oceans, while Tolarian Kraken's flavor text notes that it's contemplative, resourceful, and original, and would make a perfect student if it weren't dangerous.
- Star Frontiers: Crash on Volturnus features a race of land-dwelling, intelligent, telepathic, purple octopuses (with nine tentacles).
- Transhuman Space: Uplifted Octopuses are a race in the setting.
Video Games
- Darwin's Paradox!: Discussed. In the opening, the commercial for UFOOD made the comparison to octopuses to how people mistake them for aliens, given their looks and high intelligence. The protagonist, Darwin, uses his intelligence to maneuver and sneak past the aliens, using various mechanics throughout the journey to get to his best friend, and even uses an alien mech suit to fool the aliens by pretending to be one.
- Mega Man X1: Launch Octopus, an octopus-themed Maverick Hunter, is a cultured tactician specializing in explosives who uses brain over brawn to outwit Mavericks. He views his explosive combat style as an art, and adopts an elegant fighting strategy to achieve beauty in battle. However, he's also full of himself and is quite thin-skinned when he's criticized for his "art".
- Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate: Nakarkos is an Elder Dragon that, despite its name, looks and acts like a gigantic cuttlefish. What makes it so dangerous isn't just its laser attacks, but its cunning. It collects the bones of dead Wyverns in its lair and adorns its tentacles with their main attacking organs (e.g. Brachydios' pounders and Lagiacrus' electrically charged cells). It's only once it's close to death that Nakarkos' body starts seething with Dragon Energy, which is the unmistakamle sign of an incoming laser attack.
- Pokémon: Malamar is a squid-inspired Dark/Psychic Pokémon specializing in hypnotic attacks. However, it's its Mega evolution that boasts massive intelligence, possessing a large, swollen brain with tentacles that can enhance its psychic abilities. In this form, Mega Malamar uses its powerful intellect to calmly analyze the situation during battles. Mega Malamar's haughty personality makes it see others as pawns, and may even hypnotize its Trainer into obedience.
- Splatoon:
- Inverted with the Inklings; despite being the dominant species of Earth, the modern generation of Inklings are described to be, at best, Book Dumb. They hate mathematics, and genuinely believe that Octolings are just Inklings with exotic hair. According to their history books, the only reason why they triumph over their smarter octopus counterparts is their superior number of limbs.
- Played straight with the Octarians. They're far smarter than their squid counterparts, being able to create advanced flying saucers and giant robots out of used kitchen appliances. They also nearly won the Great Turf War against the Inklings if it weren't for the fact their Great Octoweapons were powered by an Achilles' Power Cord (which they fixed in present time). Notably, their school education heavily focuses on advanced military engineering, with many Octarians and Octolings such as Marina Ida graduating at a fairly young age.
- Subverted with the playable Octolings. While many of them are sophisticated engineer prodigies who defected from the Octarian Army, most Octolings of Inkopolis and Splatsville adopt the Inklings' hedonistic lifestyle and consequently are just barely brighter than their squid counterparts.
- Yooka-Laylee: Played with. Dr. Puzz is an octopus/human hybrid (becoming that way after a mishap with her D.N.Ray). It's originally vague about whether she used to be an octopus or a human, though she later confirms she was the former. She once worked for Quack Corp as a scientist and engineer prior to it getting bought out by Hivory Towers, and Dr. Quack subsequently stole all of her research.
Web Animation
- Gameoverse (2026): During the montage of Flappers beating the bosses of his game world (courtesy of cheats from Fold), one of the bosses is a Mad Scientist octopus.
Webcomics
- The Witch-Mother from Ennui GO! is a chambered nautilus fish-girl and is presented as an archetypal Wise Woman who is very knowledgeable in matters of the arcane.
- In xkcd strip # 520, "Cuttlefish", a biologist is showing his two trained cuttlefish to two visiting physicists.
Biologist: When we realized how intelligent they were, we began to teach them. They've advanced quickly. Cuttlefish: GO.
Cuttlefish: Kill The Physicists. Kill The Physicists.
(the two cuttlefish zap the physicists with lethal electricity)
Websites
- SCP Foundation: Both SCP-2967 and SCP-5582 are extremely intelligent octopuses, capable of learning and communicating with humans; even SCP-58586 is a skilled escape artist who has broken his containment multiple times.
Web Video
- Mark Rober demonstrates the intelligence of octopuses in his video "Octopus vs Underwater Maze, in which he acquires a pet octopus named Sashimi and builds her a nine-part underwater obstacle course for her to play with. When she passes all the obstacles with flying colors, he decides she's demonstrated she'd be capable of surviving in the wild and releases her onto the beach she was originally caught at.
Western Animation
- American Dad!: In "Killer Mimosa", Exotic animal collector Todd Foxx has an octopus named Kristoff that's smart enough to "speak" through a text-to-speech device. Kristoff is later revealed to have orchestrated Todd’s wife’s murder in order to get closer to him.
- Betty the octopus from Hey Duggee is The Smart Guy of the Squirrel Club kids despite being also being the youngest. Emphasized in her "First Day" episode where she was already speaking fluently while the others only spoke one-word sentences.
- The Octonauts: Dumbo octopus Professor Inkling is the founder of the Octonauts and knows everything there is to know about marine biology.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- Zigzagged with Squidward Tentacles; he usually plays the Only Sane Man to SpongeBob and the rest of Bikini Bottom, and tends to be knowledgeable in arts and music. However, he sometimes can make foolish decisions due to his laziness and impulsiveness, and it's repeatedly shown that he isn't as cultured as he portrays himself to be.
- Squidina Star of The Patrick Star Show is a science-loving nerd and also the executive producer of her older brother Patrick's TV show.
Real Life
- Paul the Octopus was an octopus at the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany who was able to predict World Cup soccer results with an 87-percent accuracy rate.