The octopus is much celebrated for its intelligence and use of camouflage, but one of its most remarkable achievements is how it moves.

The animal somehow controls eight long, flexible arms with a fluidity that can make it look like animated — and very smart — spaghetti. The problem of controlling this kind of movement is, as scientists say, “not trivial.”

Three Israeli researchers set out to record and analyze the movements of an octopus to plumb the secrets of how it coordinates its arms during crawling.

They found that the brain of the octopus doesn’t have to do everything, because the arms, in effect, have a mind of their own.