I give him the usual few minutes to settle—ignore me, audit the toys, decide if the shrimp is a bribe or an insult—and that’s when I see it. On the back wall, just above the tank’s rear panel, a fine Sharpie scrawl. Normally I would die on the “do not personalize the underfunded lab” hill, but the sight pulls a snort out of me anyway.
In big, blocky cube lettering:Cephalopods > all other invertebrates.And listen, I try not to play favorites—the animal kingdom is vast and deserving—but this is not, strictly speaking, wrong.
I glance at the doorway like campus security might materialize, then fish a Sharpie from my pocket. On theoutsideglass (relax, it comes off with disinfectant) I add, small and neat:Truth of life. Fight me.
When I look back, Damon has paused mid-stack to watch me from the corner of his den.
“Hey, these are all compliments to you, my friend. Don’t judge me.”
He stays very still, chromatophores smoothing a shade—his version of a raised brow, maybe. Does he get it? Possibly. Or maybe it’s anthropomorphism doing its thing. I guess we’ll never know.
I look again—and stop. He isn’t stacking with blue and yellow. He’s using red and green now. For weeks, green has been strictly logistics: brace, ferry, anchor. Never play, never probe.
I yank the common logbook, skim the last few entries. No mention of green doing anything but transport.
Now he has my full attention. We, as people, get two arms and, for the lucky, ten fingers. Our choices collapse to left or right. He has eight and a distributed controller, and octopuses usually partition labor—anterior arms for exploration, laterals for manipulation, posteriors for locomotion. Damon has been textbook. Until now.
I jot a timestamp, note his posture, pupil shape, chromatophore tone, and the order of grabs. Then the hypotheses queue up. Did the new pipe shift his body orientation so green has the better reach? Fatigue in the usual pair? Micro-irritation on a sucker I can’t see? Did today’s texture tiles bias the affordance so a different controller is optimal? If this is plasticity in action, I should see a pattern: switch, stabilize, consolidate.
I rotate the enrichment ninety degrees, counterbalance left/right, and log trial-by-trial which arm initiates, which assists, and how long the stack takes. If green holds the job through the rotation and again tomorrow, we’re looking at a genuine policy change—arm-level retuning in response to a small environmental tweak. Exactly the kind of live, breathing neuroplasticity I came here to catch.
CHAPTER SIX
So far, every time in my life I’ve uttered the word “neuroplasticity” I’ve gotten one of two things: the eye roll gloriously dedicated to tax season, or the pitiful look of “sure, nerd, you may leave now.”
And I get it, I do. But while neuroplasticity is a foreign concept to most, it’s an essential part of your brain that you can’t avoid, nor should you want to. You see, it’s like the group-chat admin in your skull. Threads you keep replying to—lyrics, names, that meme you use as a vocal stim—get pinned to the top of your mind; while threads you mute or forget to think about sink into the archive along with that embarrassing story from eighth grade.
Neuroplasticity is, by all intents and purposes, why practice works and why new places stop feeling foreign. Use a pathway and the synapses strengthen; ignore it and they loosen. Circuits reroute, branches sprout. That’s the machinery that lets any of us get better and adapt.
Humans don’t own the patent, though. The animal kingdom is crowded with learners. But almost no one does adaptationquite like cephalopods because evolution handed them a wild set-up: a distributed nervous system, fast synapses, and a genomic party trick—extensive RNA editing in neurons that tweaks protein blueprints without touching the underlying DNA. It’s like having a parts catalog you can customize on the fly.
Which is why they feel like a true wonder of nature to me, and why I will evangelize until my last breath. And yesterday, Damon gave me fresh evidence I’m chasing the right thesis. His sudden arm swap—green taking over a stacking task it has never initiated—has had my brain buzzing for twelve hours. While I’m more than aware that every arm is anatomically and neurologically capable of the whole repertoire—grip, probe, flatten, flow— octopuses, Damon included, still develop preferences. So why the sudden switch? I spent the night running hypotheses in circles and landed on the only rational next step: ask Dr. Kymbert.
She did say I could come by anytime, right? I’m simply holding her to it.
I pull the door of my room shut as quietly as possible, tiptoeing my way out. Needless to say, Maya wasnotamused by last night’s desk lamp and muttering; she nailed me with a pillow, added a very rude Lily Allen song to my playlist, and—before going back to sleep—promised to bring fried calamari to our dorm if I ever do it again.
So I make my way to the communal washroom and assemble a version of me that reads scholar. The dark circles win against the concealer, which is fine, and my curls are beyond negotiation, so I sweep them into a bun. White canvas pants, white tank, a blue pinstripe linen shirt with the sleeves rolled. Acceptable, for a meeting with my favorite professor.
Before today, the only person I’ve ever felt truly comfortable going to for academic advice—untangling, translating, reality-checking—has been my mentor, Blythe. She’s in her forties, frighteningly smart in a way that makes you want to fall a little in love with her brain and, more importantly, she never judged me. I could walk into her office a knot of half-thoughts and dead ends and, by the time I waved goodbye, we’d have them lined up and labeled. I miss her. I miss her vendetta against anything non-caffeinated, the jar of Jolly Ranchers on her desk, the slight lisp that made even hard truths sound kind.
She’s also the one who put Dr. Kymbert on my own personal map. When we were running the Manoa calculus, Blythe talked me through her papers, her instincts, the way her lab thinks. A chunk of my admiration is borrowed from Blythe’s confidence—which only makes me more eager to go knock on Kymbert’s door today and ask her to help me think.
I stop for a lemon-poppy scone and an iced coffee in lieu of breakfast, and start back down the path towards the marine sciences building. A bit of a detour, some would say, since I can practically see the building from my dorm window—but fuel is fuel, and today it’s nonnegotiable. On three hours of sleep and a case of nerves, sugar and caffeine are the difference between upright and listing.
Balancing the sweet pastry on my cup lid, I pull out my phone with the other hand and cue up yesterday’s Damon footage. In this clip he’s wrestling a LEGO brick—rightfully so, because I slipped in a different-sized piece that won’t connect—and then he launches it out of the tank. Angry little things, they are. I’m still giggling at the screen when I slam into a wall.
The scone tips off my coffee; and my balance goes with it. Gravity, my oldest frenemy, takes over. Then the wall grows hands—one catches the scone seconds before it hits the ground, the other closes on my elbow and stops the floor from meeting my face. Have I really spent this much time with an octopus that I now picture extra arms on anything with a flat surface?
One look up says the “wall” isn’t brick at all—it’s Holden. My scone sits on his open palm; my elbow is still cradled in his other hand, warm and steady, his thumb right where my pulse betrays me. His brows are knit—concern, annoyance, maybe both—and for a second I forget how to stand on my own.
“Oh—um—Holden.” I step out of his hold and reassemble what passes for composure. “You’re not a wall.”
One brow lifts; so does one corner of his mouth. “You don’t say.”
I roll my eyes, reclaim the scone from his palm, and slide past him toward Dr. Kymbert’s office. “It’s not my fault you’re built like one.”
A sound rumbles out of him—almost a laugh, low enough to catch at my spine. I glance back, but the moment’s already filed away; his face is neutral again, eyes unreadable. I exhale, because of course my social skills choose now to glitch—ten minutes before I’m supposed to discuss a thesis with a genius woman.
