Do octopuses dream? Scientists haven’t cracked that mystery, but they have come a bit closer. WorldSleepDay
Still, the researchers are cautious about drawing too many similarities. Octopuses and mammals have very different brain architecture, notes team member Sidarta Ribeiro, a sleep neuroscientist at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte .
In humans, dreaming usually happens during REM sleep, but"we cannot ask the octopus if they are really dreaming," says team member Sylvia Lima de Souza Medeiros, a neuroscience graduate student at UFRN. But she hypothesizes that her team could test this in the lab by comparing skin color changes while the octopus is awake and learning a new challenge, and while it is sleeping."Maybe what they show in the skin can be related to what they are dreaming about," she says.
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