Answer To Your Questions About Paul ,The Octopus

Hi everyone.!! I found this article in Discovery. I wanted to share it. Everyone of us knew what Paul " The oracle octopus" did in 2010 WC. It predicted the winners of all of Germans matches and even the Mega game of Sports " WC finals"..

I've always believed that what Paul was doing is not real..An octopus has sense ,but not predicting things..Do you think Octopuses are like Nicholas Cage from "Next" who can sense the future?? Like get a life!!! They can sense colours..but not sense the future

The article goes like this
---------

We've heard of cats that can predict deaths and toads that can predict earthquakes, but none of these animals had the fate of a nation sitting squarely on its (many) shoulders like Paul, the World Cup-predicting octopus.

This seemingly psychic cephalopod predicted the winner of this year’s World Cup, Spain, as well as the winners of all six German matches before that. In case you’re wondering, the odds of you doing that are 1 in 128.

So what’s Paul’s story? Is he fixing these matches? Some sort of time-traveling mollusk that stole Biff’s idea from Back to the Future 2? Or is he just really, really lucky?

I called Alan Peters, invertebrate curator at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, to get his take on Paul’s football prowess. He told me:

"Particularly among invertebrates, octopi are very intelligent, but that intelligence can be defined in different ways."

Like say... picking the winning teams for a worldwide soccer tournament?

"Predictive power I don’t think is part of that," he added.

Peters notes that octopi are visually oriented and can be trained and stimulated with food and objects. And while Paul was presented with two identical boxes containing mussels, since both boxes contained food, it couldn’t have been the deciding factor.

"Maybe there’s some similarities on all the flags that the octopus chose," he said. "You could really dig into this deep if you wanted to tease out why this happened."

Yes, the flags! Each time, the researchers put the German flag on one box, and the flag of their opponent on the other (except for the final). Octopi, Peters said, are able to detect differences in shapes and patterns, as well as colors.

"They don’t see color like we do but they can tell the differences between different colors, said Peters. "It’s just that their brain doesn’t say ‘red here and yellow there,’ it says 'these two things are different.'"

----------------