The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [31]
So what structure in the prokaryotic cell provides its “intelligence”? The prokaryotes’ cytoplasm has no evident organelles, such as the nucleus and mitochondria, that are found in more advanced, eukaryotic cells. The only organized cellular structure that can be considered a candidate for the prokaryote’s brain is its cell membrane.
Bread, Butter, Olives, and Pimentos
As I came to the realization that membranes were characteristic of all intelligent life, I focused my attention on understanding their structure and function. I came up with a gastronomic treat (just kidding) to illustrate the basic structure of the membrane. The treat consists of a bread and butter sandwich. To further refine the analogy, I added olives. Actually my instructive sandwich features two kinds of olives, ones stuffed with pimentos, the others pimento-free. Gourmands, don’t groan. When I’ve left this sandwich out of my lectures, repeat members of the audience have asked me where it went!
Here’s an easy experiment to show you how the “sandwich” membrane works. Make a bread-and-butter sandwich (at the moment free of olives). This sandwich represents a section of the cell membrane.
Now pour a teaspoon of colored dye on top of the sandwich.
As illustrated below, the dye seeps through the bread but stops when it gets to the butter because the oily substance in the middle of the sandwich provides an effective barrier.
Now let’s make a bread and butter sandwich with stuffed and unstuffed olives.
Now when we add the dye to the bread and slice the sandwich, we see a different result. When the dye hits a pimento-stuffed olive, it stops as surely as it stopped when it hit butter. But when the dye reaches an olive without a pimento, the pitted olive provides a channel through which the dye can flow freely across the middle of the sandwich, then through the bread to the plate.
The plate in this analogy represents the cell’s cytoplasm. By passing through the pimento-free olive, the dye penetrates the buttery layer to reach the other side of the “membrane” sandwich. The dye has successfully navigated the formidable, fatty, membrane barrier!
It is important for the cell to allow molecules to break through the barrier because in my sandwich analogy, the dye is life-sustaining food. If the membrane were simply a bread and butter sandwich, it would provide a fortress-like barrier that keeps out the cacophony of innumerable molecular and radiant energy signals that make up a cell’s environment. But the cell would die if the membrane were such a fortress because it would get no nutrients. When you add the pimento-free olives, which allow information and food into the cell, the membrane becomes a vital and ingenious mechanism enabling selected nutrients to penetrate the interior of the cell, just as the teaspoonful of dye made its way to the plate.
In real-life cellular biology, the bread-and-butter portion of the sandwich represents the membrane’s phospholipids, one of the two major chemical components of the membrane. (The other major chemical components are the “olive” proteins, which we’ll get to below.) I call phospholipids “schizophrenic” because they are composed of both polar and nonpolar molecules.
The fact that phospholipids contain both polar and nonpolar molecules may not sound like a recipe for schizophrenia to you, but I assure you it is. All the molecules in our universe can be divided into nonpolar and polar categories based on the type of chemical bonds that hold their atoms together. The bonds among polar molecules have positive and/or negative charges, hence their polarity. These molecules’ positive and negative