How does an animal with no skeleton, no somatotopic brain map, and eight arms containing more neurons than its central brain manage to produce precise, goal-directed movements? Neuroscientist Benny Hochner reveals how the octopus solves the seemingly impossible problem of controlling a soft body with infinite degrees of freedom. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Benny Hochner joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to discuss his research on motor control and learning in the octopus , an animal he describes as the most intelligent invertebrate and a remarkable case study in convergent and divergent evolution. With half a billion neurons, most distributed across its eight arms rather than centralized in the brain, the octopus has evolved a radically different solution to motor control t ...