The Multiple Minds Collaborative brings together researchers studying three lineages that evolved sophisticated cognition entirely independently of one another — and of us: bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales, and octopuses. Separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution and built on radically different nervous systems, the three offer a rare natural experiment in what intelligence actually requires, and what, if anything, is unique about our own.
The collaborative studies each species through two lenses: agency, an animal’s capacity to choose and direct its own actions, and communication, how it acquires, represents, and exchanges information. Led by Brenda McCowan (UC Davis), Marcelo Magnasco (Rockefeller University), and Diana Reiss (Hunter College and Rockefeller University), the team unites marine mammal cognition, cephalopod neuroscience, bioacoustic AI, linguistics, and music cognition — fields that rarely work together — to ask whether intelligence is a single convergent solution nature keeps rediscovering, or a family of genuinely distinct capacities shaped by different bodies, senses, and worlds.