Electrophysiological studies of octopus neural activity have been hampered by the inability to anchor recording equipment to hard anatomical structures or to the outside of the octopus’s body. Gutnick, Neef, Cherninskyi and colleagues describe a protocol for inserting a small, portable data logger into the animal and obtaining up to 12 hours of brain recordings from unanesthetized and untethered octopuses. They also use a high-definition camera to gather behavioral and motion data concurrently with the neural recordings. This and other exciting papers have made it a big year of multi-armed scientific explorations into these capable cephalopods, and we look forward to learning more about them.