APRIL 20, 2023|NON-OBVIOUS THINKING
What We Can Learn From The Curious Case Of The Immortal Jellyfish
Imagine an animal that could live forever. Actually, you don't have to imagine it because one might already exist. The jellyfish known scientifically as Turritopsis dohrnii is nicknamed the "immortal jellyfish" because it indeed could live forever. Research shows that "when this creature becomes damaged for whatever reason, it can revert to a blob of living tissue that eventually develops back into a polyp, and once again its developmental process repeats."
Sadly, jellyfish don't have brains and are therefore not recognized as sentient in the way that octopus, lobsters and crabs have been. So while this jellyfish could live forever, it probably isn't aware of it which seems like kind of a waste.
Still, the idea of death is so fundamental to how we think about living organisms. Questioning this basic assumption about all life is an irresistibly non-obvious thought exercise. If a jellyfish can live forever, what else might we discover in the 80% of the ocean that still remains unexplored?
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How It All Started
A Short Backstory Of This Blog
This is a blog about non-obvious ideas. Originally launched on the Typepad platform in 2005 as the Influential Marketing blog, the stories at first focused mainly on digital marketing while Rohit worked at Ogilvy Advertising. In 2015 Rohit officially rebranded to the Non-Obvious Insights Blog and published his WSJ bestseller Non-Obvious. For the past twenty one years, this blog has coined new terms, introduced future marketing practices and inspired the next generation of non-obvious thinkers and marketers.
