Tooltips

Compartmentalisation confusion: the erroneous attribution of the behaviour, information, intention or consequences of one active schema process to a broader containing schema, sibling schemas, a high-level interface, the ego-model or the self as a whole because awareness lacks sufficient causal resolution.

Provenance loss: loss of conscious access to the originating schema, informational state or developmental cause of an experienced downstream output following one or more mask-mediated transformations or redirects.

Self-monitoring is a psychological concept that means watching and changing your own behaviour, feelings, and actions to fit social rules or reach personal goals. People use it to manage how others see them or to track habits like health, mood, or work focus

Camouflaging in autism is the conscious or subconscious process of hiding autistic traits to blend in with neurotypical social norms. People use it to avoid bullying, find jobs, or feel accepted, but it often causes severe mental exhaustion, anxiety, and autistic burnout.

Environmental incongruence: a circumstance in which an otherwise available response conflicts with another high-priority environmental requirement.

Interoceptive processing is the nervous system’s ability to sense, integrate, and interpret signals from inside the body—such as heartbeat, hunger, pain, and temperature. This hidden sense maps our internal landscape to guide basic survival needs and shape emotional experiences in the brain.

Sensory gating is the brain’s automatic process of filtering out repetitive, unimportant environmental stimuli—such as the hum of a refrigerator or ticking of a clock—to prevent sensory overload in higher brain centres

Proprioception is your body’s hidden “sixth sense”. It allows you to perceive your position, movement, and muscle force in space without relying on your eyes. This automatic feedback loop lets you walk, type, or touch your nose with your eyes closed.

Cardiovascular regulation is the body’s multi-system process for controlling blood flow, heart rate, and blood pressure to match changing metabolic demands and maintain stable organ perfusion. It relies on fast neural reflexes, slower hormonal pathways, and local tissue autoregulation operating through core principles explored in Cardiovascular System Physiology.

In the framework outlined by Khalsa et al. (2018) via the National Institutes of Health (NIH), adaptive behaviour relies on interoception—the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates internal bodily signals to drive homeostatic and functional responses