“Let’s pretend you have very early-stage cancer. The dendritic cells are in their normal cycle of desperately presenting tumor fragments to T cells, the T-cells rightfully getting upset, activating themselves, and going off to hunt the cancer. But cancer simply shuts them down by expressing an immune blocker protein: PD-L1. In response, the T-cell mostly shuts down, wanders back to the lymphatic system, and gets a little bit more ‘exhausted’. It believes that it activated itself for no reason, and thus will require a much higher bar for doing anything else in the future. The more times this occurs, the more exhausted the T-cell becomes, the more unwilling to ever activate again. In the limit, it will simply kill itself. Hence why you need immunotherapy to revitalize these cells!”

That’s a powerful analog for depression and burnout in humans.

And not necessarily just an analog, given how there is an immune component to stress.

Yeah, so many things use the same memory response curve to adjust their behavior, but that model can fail rapidly in these conditions. Very interesting to read though.