And there’s one more figure in the paper—the one from the box. I’m proud of all our figures, so I just can’t resist sharing this one too. It integrates the key concepts behind our embodied account of self-relevance using the MDP framework with the internal environment (Singh et al., 2009).

We first suggest that self-relevance is rooted in interoceptive inference and value estimation—how the brain predicts the long-term impact of events on the body’s internal state. We call this internal model of the internal bodily state an affective map, in parallel with a cognitive map.

The default mode network (DMN) is often described as the brain’s “self” network. But what kind of self are we talking about? Most studies focus on the conceptual or narrative self — we revisit it from an embodied perspective.