page_title: Pain in invertebrates
section_title: Central nervous system
hierarchical_section_title: Pain in invertebrates / Suitable nervous system / Central nervous system
caption_attribution_description: English: Octopus marginatus hiding between two shells from East Timor. This small octopus of no more than 4-5 cm in diameter was observed on a night dive, using one nut shell and one clam shell to hide between. When the octopus felt there was no threat, it came out of the shells and using the inner parts of its tentacles, proceeded to carry the shells while pulling itself along with the outer tips of the same tentacles. Sensing any threat, the octopus clamped itself shut between the shells with amazing speed.
context_page_description: Pain in invertebrates is a contentious issue. Although there are numerous definitions of pain, almost all involve two key components. First, nociception is required. This is the ability to detect noxious stimuli which evokes a reflex response that moves the entire animal, or the affected part of its body, away from the source of the stimulus. The concept of nociception does not imply any adverse, subjective feeling; it is a reflex action. The second component is the experience of "pain" itself, or suffering—i.e., the internal, emotional interpretation of the nociceptive experience. Pain is therefore a private, emotional experience. Pain cannot be directly measured in other animals, including other humans; responses to putatively painful stimuli can be measured, but not the experience itself. To address this problem when assessing the capacity of other species to experience pain, argument-by-analogy is used. This is based on the principle that if a non-human animal's responses to stimuli are similar to those of humans, it is likely to have had an analogous experience.
context_section_description: Brain size does not necessarily equate to complexity of function. Moreover, weight for body-weight, the cephalopod brain is in the same size bracket as the vertebrate brain, smaller than that of birds and mammals, but as big or bigger than most fish brains.
  Invertebrate nervous systems are very unlike those of vertebrates and this dissimilarity has sometimes been used to reject the possibility of a pain experience in invertebrates. In humans, the neocortex of the brain has a central role in pain and it has been argued that any species lacking this structure will therefore be incapable of feeling pain. However, it is possible that different structures may be involved in the pain experience of other animals in the way that, for example, crustacean decapods have vision despite lacking a human visual cortex.
  Two groups of invertebrates have notably complex brains: arthropods (insects, crustaceans, arachnids, and others) and modern cephalopods (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish) and other molluscs. The brains of arthropods and cephalopods arise from twin parallel nerve cords that extend through the body of the animal. Arthropods have a central brain with three divisions and large optic lobes behind each eye for visual processing. The brains of the modern cephalopods in particular are highly developed, comparable in complexity to the brains of some vertebrates (See also: Invertebrate brains). Emerging results suggest that a convergent evolutionary process has led to the selection of vertebrate-like neural organization and activity-dependent long-term synaptic plasticity in these invertebrates. Cephalopods stand out by having a central nervous system that shares prime electrophysiological and neuroanatomical features with vertebrates like no other invertebrate taxon.
caption: The octopus Amphioctopus marginatus
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