They're very intelligent for sure, but their neurons are also a lot bigger. About 500 million neurons in an octopus (whole body) vs 86 billion in a human (just the brain.)
Size and quantity of neurons isn’t known to determine intellectual capacity, plus for all we know that’s just RAM… they live a few years, max, we live considerable longer, maybe they literally don’t need as much long term storage to fill with, for example, misplaced nostalgia for 1980s toy commercials?
I would argue that having so much capacity for memory retention that our brains can spare space on frivolous things like that is marvelous in and of itself. Retention of information is arguably as important as the capacity for information. Humans passing down stories for generations, then inventing the written word to preserve ideas for years and year, is itself a beautifully complex thing.
I mean that it appears that octopus “cognition” — dangerously a word we control and can easily twist to only apply to us — is almost necessarily more complex than human cognition, if for no other reason than they seem to have distributed their “thinking” — another dangerously solipsistic word — into their arms and out into their body, well away from merely their brains.
