In physically large cell communities, most of the constituent cells are not in direct contact with the environment. Out of necessity, a subset of the cellular population became specialized in reading the environment and relaying their “perceptions” to cells internalized within the community. These information handling cells became the organism’s nervous system. Today, individual cellular communities may be comprised of trillions of cells. For example, human beings represent a social community of from 50 to 70 trillion cellular citizens. Each human cell, like an amoeba, is a free-living entity, possessing Innate Intelligence and capable of appropriately responding to its “local” (i.e., tissue-specific) environment. Through the action of the nervous system, each individual cell is also influenced by a much larger environment, that experienced by the whole organism.9 Your liver cell knows what’s going on in your liver, but through the nervous system, it also aware of what’s going on in your job or in your relationships.

 

As illustrated here, the cell’s receive environmental signals via the central nervous system. In truth, the cell’s receive a “perception” of the environment as interpreted by the Educated brain.

Our nervous system tabulates approximately four billion environmental signals per second. Its primary role is to “read” the environment and make appropriate adjustments of growth and protection behaviors in order to ensure survival. Memory systems evolved to facilitate information handling by storing previously “learned” experiences. Memories, which represent perceptions, are scored on the basis of whether they support growth or require a protection response. In chiropractic philosophy, these learned perceptions constitute the Educated Intellect, which is by evolutionary design, a derivative of the collective Innate Intelligence.

As described above, the switch between growth and protection behaviors in unicellular organisms is “digital.” An individual cell moves either forward or backward. In organisms comprised of large numbers of cells, environmental signals can elicit a graded, “analog” response, wherein some cells are in growth and others are in protection.

The more relevant a stimulus is to the organism’s survival, the more polarized (either + or -) the resulting response. In humans, the extremes of the two polarities might appropriately be described as LOVE (+) and FEAR (-). Love fuels growth. In contrast, fear stunts growth. In fact, someone can literally be “scared to death.”