When we are ill, our emphases shift. During times when things are well, our minds and bodies are employed in meeting as well as creating demands. There isn’t much other than psychophysical attending to and manipulation of impinging stimuli. With illness, especially if it is severe or chronic, there is perhaps the appearance of added space. In occupying the mind, such a compartment inhabits the body too, and impinging stimuli are therefore factored differently.
The ability to weather pain and distress arising from the illness could either be augmented or hampered as a consequence of this novel psychophysical factoring. The expressions of ill-health in an individual can be varied even if there were only the previous baseline but this new distribution likely alters the application of our faculties such that any predominant tone and emphases that emerge could become a significant determinant of how closely the non-diseased baseline can be reestablished.
It appears that the modality of attention might be a significant variable with the ill-health induced novel baseline. This is because filtering is amongst the earliest processes that converge on stimulus and attention considerably modifies the intensity of selection. This variable, when viewed as a modality that is both psychic and somatic might be instrumental in developing the capacity to integrate the alteration in psychophysical processing so that any new baseline approximates the one existing earlier.