I hope I'm not breaking any rules here (If I am please say so and I will get rid of this).
Here are some parts from the article in Discover:
What cephalopods can teach us about language
By Jaron Lanier
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 04 | April 2006 | Technology
... As far as I'm concerned, cephalopods are the strangest smart creatures on Earth. They offer the best standing example of how truly different intelligent extraterrestrials (if they exist) might be from us, and they taunt us with clues about potential futures for our own species.
Two components are involved in morphing: a change in the image or texture visible on a shape's surface and a change in the underlying shape itself. The "pixels" in the skin of a cephalopod are organs called chromatophores. These can expand and contract quickly, and each is filled with a pigment of a particular color. When a nerve signal causes a red chromatophore to expand, the "pixel" turns red. A pattern of nerve firings causes a shifting image—an animation—to appear on the cephalopod's skin. As for shapes, an octopus can quickly arrange its arms to form a wide variety of them, like a fish or a piece of coral, and can even raise welts on its skin to add texture.
Why morph? One reason is camouflage. ... Another is dinner.
... Virtual reality, an immersive computer-graphics environment that a human can "enter" and then morph himself into various things, is a pale approximation of the experience. ... Some of the earliest experimental avatars in fact were aquatic, including one that allowed a person to inhabit a lobster's body.
... Our software tools are not yet flexible enough to enable us, in virtual reality, to think ourselves into different forms. Why would we want to? Consider the existing benefits of our ability to create sounds with our mouths. We can make new noises and mimic existing ones, spontaneously and instantaneously. But when it comes to visual communication, we are hamstrung. We can mime, ... We can learn to draw and paint, or use computer-graphics design software. But we cannot generate images at the speed with which we can imagine them.
... Suppose we had the ability to morph at will: What sort of language might that make possible? Would it be the same old conversation, or would we be able to "say" new things to one another?
... Some people think that the ability to morph would just give you a new dictionary mapping to the same old set of ideas ...
... Perhaps they {cephalopods} offer a useful surrogate for thinking about one way that intelligent aliens, if and wherever they are out there, might one day present themselves to us. ... We humans think a lot of ourselves as a species; we have a tendency to suppose that the way we think is the only way to think. Maybe we need to think again.