Dr. Giulia Enders

How are the cells of my toes?

Just being curious and really having some self-knowledge.

And they'll actually educate themselves more and more over the course of our lives.

And then with that knowledge, they will decide, will they attack a virus that sits in the nerve of the eye?

Because if they do, we might go blind.

So our immune system actually is very smart and oftentimes will not attack something in the visual nerve.

which it would attack somewhere else, let's say in the skin or in the throat, it would easily just attack some cells.

But it doesn't because it has all this self-knowledge and curiosity.

And it will cooperate with good bacteria, for example, in the gut, and tolerate bacteria that just don't do anything horrible.

So there's much more to it than just a defensive system.

intelligence is just a network.

And an immune system can also build exactly that, a network out of cells.

And they will have direct conversation with each other.

They will be, you know, coordinating each other and having multiple networks and connections just like a neural network can.

And so it is actually scientifically correct to say it is a network that has

a kind of intelligence not the cognitive kind but a cellular kind of intelligence and also you know it learns it gathers a memory over the course of our lives so that when we are older our immune system will be very different it will already know many like germs and maybe not get as sick from them as it got when we were little children so there's a lot to that that actually makes it correct to say there's a form of intelligence here

Yes, it is independent to some degree, but we can definitely communicate and influence our immune system.

Oftentimes we just think it as the immune system is this army and we need to strengthen it, take all the supplements, take all the things.

But then, you know, when you look at it more as a curiosity system, just stimulating it to be super aggressive is not so good.

If you're just angry the whole time, you can't be curious in a smart way.