All of our systems function differently at low intensity that they do at high intensity.
Low Intensity
Walking without obstacles would be a good symbol for low intensity. Because there are no obstacles or anything threatening, the body functions very efficiently. The oxygen metabolism dominates. The walker does have to interact with the environment a little bit. For example if you are walking and see a branch, you will just move away without thinking too much about it. You are still balancing. You aren’t really prepared for loud noises or having a ball thrown at you.
High Intensity
As soon as something appears in the environment or your memories that you have to or want to deal with, your physiology moves into a high intensity state. Think of a campfire with a log. The log burning slowly is the low intensity state. At times you need a boost in the fire, so you might throw some paper and lighter fluid on the fire. That spark is the high intensity state. The low intensity state should still exists (although in some people the low intensity state is so weak it barely exists), but the higher intensity state takes priority based on the importance of the thing you are dealing with.
Suppose you are going for a walk on the beach and you hear someone talking about a tsunami. At that exact moment you would start looking for clues to find out what is going on. You might now notice all kinds of people, listening to everything. A minute before when you were walking, you weren’t very perceptive. All the sounds of people talking were drowned out, never making their way to your awareness.
Whenever someone is in pain, we test them to see what state they are in. We just send a high volume of non-threatening information by oscillating some of the joints. If they are in a a higher state, they might become more and more aware of the pain. It does become more nuanced that this, but at least it is easy to imagine a person going for a walk, tuning out background noise in one scenario, and in another scenario noticing everything going on around them.
We delineate high intensity into excitability and focus. The low intensity state is delineated into endurance and posture. There is an article on each of these states. Each intensity has a corresponding function in terms of the immune system, information processing, digestion, etc, and each of these systems will have an article explaining how they change based on intensity. From there the common named diseases should be easy to explain using this model. Ultimately the purpose of the model is to show people how to train/schedule their days to prevent disease and optimize performance.
