Embodied mechanisms of motor control in the octopus

Achieving complex behavior in soft-bodied animals is a hard task, because their body morphology is not constrained by a fixed number of jointed elements, as in skeletal animals, and thus the control system has to deal with practically an infinite number of control variables (degrees of freedom). Almost 30 years of research on Octopus vulgaris motor control has revealed that octopuses efficiently control their body with strategies that emerged during the adaptive coevolution of their nervous system and body morphology. In this minireview, we highlight principles of embodied organization that were revealed by studying octopus motor control, and that are used as inspiration for soft robotics. We describe the evolved solutions to the problem, implemented from the lowest level, the muscular system, to the network organization in higher motor control centers of the octopus brain. We show how the higher motor control centers, where the sensory–motor interface lies, can control and coordinate limbs with large degrees of freedom without using body-part maps to represent sensory and motor information, as they do in vertebrates. We demonstrate how this unique control mechanism, which allows efficient control of the body in a large variety of behaviors, is embodied within the animal's body morphology.