Maybe we are more like octopuses than we think

I have always been fascinated by octopuses.

As a child growing up by the sea, my father would fish them almost every day. I still remember watching them emerge from the water: soft, fluid, almost unreal. Back then, eating octopus was simply part of life. Looking back, I’m not exactly proud of the number of them I consumed over the years. But even then, before I understood anything about marine biology or intelligence, I already felt something unusual toward them. A kind of quiet reverence.

Because octopuses do not feel like ordinary creatures.

They have three hearts. Blue blood. The ability to instantly change color and texture, almost dissolving into their surroundings like living water. They can squeeze through impossibly small openings because they have no skeleton. Their arms can think independently, with much of their nervous system distributed throughout their body rather than centralized in the brain. They solve puzzles, escape tanks, recognize humans, use tools, and some scientists believe they experience forms of curiosity and play.

The more you learn about them, the less they seem to belong to our world.

And maybe that is why I have always felt a strange, almost spiritual connection to them. They carry a kind of intelligence that feels radically different from ours: soft instead of rigid, adaptive instead of dominant, mysterious instead of performative.

Lately, though, it feels like the fascination with octopuses is no longer just personal. Society itself seems increasingly obsessed with them.

Documentaries like My Octopus Teacher transformed a simple underwater encounter into a global emotional phenomenon. Books like Other Minds explored the octopus as perhaps the closest thing we have to an alien intelligence on Earth. Social media constantly circulates videos of octopuses escaping aquariums, opening jars, solving puzzles, and interacting with humans in ways that feel strangely emotional and intimate.

It makes me wonder if our collective fascination with octopuses says less about marine biology… and more about ourselves.

For decades, business and market research have tried to understand humans as rational creatures. We built surveys, segmentation models, and decision trees based on the assumption that people think logically and consistently. Ask the right question, collect the right data, and human behavior would become predictable.

But behavioral science has gradually revealed something far messier.

Most human decisions are not centralized and rational. They are emotional, contextual, adaptive, and often contradictory. We respond to environments, tensions, habits, moods, social signals, and subconscious cues far more than we like to admit. Like octopuses, we do not simply calculate our way through the world. We sense it.

That is why the future of human understanding may require a different kind of intelligence from brands and organizations too. Less rigid. Less obsessed with control and certainty. More observational. More immersive. More sensitive to context and emotional nuance.

Because perhaps humans are not the hyper-rational creatures business once imagined.

Perhaps we are closer to octopuses than we think.

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Where could Innate Motion help?

As human behavior becomes increasingly fluid, emotional, and contextual, organizations can no longer rely solely on rigid segmentation or purely rational models of decision-making. At Innate Motion, we help brands move beyond static consumer categories toward a deeper understanding of the cultural tensions, emotional drivers, and adaptive behaviors shaping people’s lives today. Through immersive human understanding, cultural decoding, and co-creative methodologies, we help organizations design brands, experiences, and cultures that resonate more naturally with the beautifully messy intelligence of being human.

P.S. Want your business to feel more human and make a bigger impact? Let’s fix that! Book a free 30-minute consultation and let’s tackle your biggest or smallest business challenge together.

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