Episode 122: Frank Grasso Talks About Octopuses

Animal Instinct

This week on Animal Instinct, Celia is joined in studio by Frank Grasso. Frank is a Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College the City University of New York. He directs the BioMimetic and Cognitive Robotics research laboratory there the aim of which is to understand how brains control and coordinate behavior in animals. His research with octopuses follows the lab philosophy that to understand brain function one must be able study the organism, build a brain model that captures the behavior and validate that model by comparing robot performance against animal performance on the same task. Octopuses represent an great challenge to this approach because they are so alien and so complex in brain and body.