But the only way I can describe what I was seeing that day was that this octopus was playing, which is a pretty sophisticated behavior for a mere invertebrate.

And the aquarium had a lot of big fish tanks but not a lot of invertebrate displays, and being the spineless guy, I thought, well I'll just go out in the field and collect these wonderful animals I had been learning about as a student and bring them in, and I built these elaborate sets and put them on display.

So here's two sort of canonical neurons from a vertebrate and an invertebrate, a human pyramidal neuron from Ramon y Cajal, and another cell to the right, a non spiking interneuron, and this is the work of Alan Watson and Malcolm Burrows many years ago, and Malcolm Burrows came up with a pretty interesting idea based on the fact that this neuron from a locust does not fire action potentials.