The Application Of The Goldilocks Principle In Maintaining Our Health

Anything that is unregulated can spiral out of control, and we wouldn't want that to happen to ourselves.

In the realm of music, an amplifier is a gadget that

turns the low voltage signals from your source equipment into a signal with enough gain to be used to power a pair of speakers.

It does so by amplifying the signal, or in layman’s terms, increasing the signal.

If we are in an argument with other people and we are raising our voices, our voices get amplified as well.

Of course, the idea of amplification isn’t limited to just sound signals.

There are other things that can be amplified as well.

Another synonym for amplification would be escalation - as in the escalation of issues from one hierarchy to the next hierarchy in any given organisation. When a person does not have sufficient power to deal with a certain issue at their workplace, they raise/amplify/intensify/escalate the issue to their managers, for instance.

Even the response towards stocking up on toilet paper during the COVID-19 lockdown stages was a response that was amplified by fear. People feared being unable to get the necessary toilet paper/food staples that they projected to need during the lockdown period, and went to sweep the supermarket aisles clean of all those essentials.

So while being able to amplify a signal is one thing on its own, being able to regulate the intensity of its amplification is another story altogether.

Because that also is how our immune system functions:

The Hierarchical Nature Of The Immune System

This leads us to the Goldilocks Principle. Much like how Goldilocks found Papa Bear’s porridge too hot and Mama Bear’s porridge too cold, while Baby Bear’s porridge was “just right”, the author Christopher Booker states that

The idea that the way forward lies in finding an exact middle path between opposites is of extraordinary importance in storytelling.

Unfortunately, the balance in our life also involves finding an exact middle path. We’d need to be able to get our immune system to amplify inflammatory signals appropriately. We don’t want it to overshoot too much. We want it just right.