SPEAKER_02

It's called the Kinesia illusion.

And tell me what you see.

Honestly, I like that description.

A lot of people see a triangle when they look at it.

Yeah, exactly.

So to a lot of people, it seems like there's a white triangle on top of those black

And researchers have known that the brain has neurons that respond to both the edges of real objects and the edges of illusions or objects that aren't really there like that triangle.

But these were different neurons specifically activated by the edges of the illusion.

One of the study authors, Hei-Young Shin, says with a lot more work, and of course work on humans, this could help researchers understand mental disorders that affect perception.

Scientists analyzed a bunch of videos of octopuses in the wild, and they were like, great, what's each individual arm doing here?

That's Chelsea Bennis.

She's a field biologist at Florida Atlantic University and a co-author of the study.

Two things.

One, there was no arm specialization, meaning all of their arms were capable of doing all the same actions.

But, two...

the octopuses still seem to prefer doing certain tasks with certain arms.

The majority of the time, they use their front arms for exploration and their back arms for locomotion.

Yeah, when we asked Chelsea, she told us that it could help us get inspiration for flexible or soft robotics, which she says could be helpful for things like search and recovery or even ocean exploration.

And Ari, if you want to see some of the videos the researchers looked at, plus peek at some cute octopuses, we'll have that video online and in our show notes.

I think it's both, right?