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).

This work was co-led by two brilliant co-first authors —💫 Hong Ji Kim (@hongjikim.bsky.social) and Jeong In Lee. Their creativity and deep thinking made this piece possible. Grateful to work with such inspiring scholars!

We also reinterpret self-referential processing through the lens of second-order cybernetics. The DMN participates in recursive brain–body loops—sensing, predicting, and regulating itself. The DMN (and the brain), in this view, is not a detached observer but a part of a reflexive, nontrivial system.

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.