'It is ÆPT' to liken a brain (or a central neural Actention Selection Serving System — accEPTably truncated to figure as the "AS" right in the middle of EAVASIVE) to a "competition" between adaptively and functionally incompatible and to some extent also mutually inhibitory actention modules. What is competed for is nothing more than the prize of becoming an actention module that is situationally granted a temporarily dominant status.
The cost of such a metaphorical prize (the kind of metabolic expenditure that allows an actention module corresponding to a particular reflex/preoccupation/behavior — e.g. one as complex as "playing or trying to play something on a violin" or "writing or trying to write about ASSSs", or when a low nuritient level sensing neuron kicking-off a more or less complex 'food-seeking module' that may luckily link-up with 'an eating module'.
An actention module may do nothing more than just abide, or exist as a potential but ontogenetically (developmentally) readied and physioanatomically available actention module.
However, when, or if, it becomes temporarily dominant (within an ASSS) it is being "paid" (fuelled) in the primary currency of neurometabolic resources.
A temporarily dominant actention module is primarily "paid for" in this currency regardless of what kind of behavior or preoccupation that a paid actention module manifests as.
On the other hand, different temporarily dominant actention modules do of course involve correspondingly different neural assemblies (or sensory-motivational and motor circuitries).
This ÆPT metaphor—"an ASSS as a competition"—comprises a notion of both current and past 'cheering and booing audience'; i.e. current and past circumstantial challenges of opportunity type and threat type, or ditto input, that are always environmentally presented to individuals=Units of Reproduction.
By ÆPTly dichotomised didactic defintion, opportunity-type challenges are directly or indirectly procreation promoting if taken or successfully exploited, whereas threat-type challenges are required to be dealt with or somehow coped with by being survived individually or by lineage-lengthening self-sacrifice.
Irrelevant and at the same time insignificant but initially possibly attention drawing/orienting reflex producing circumstantial sources of sensory stimulation are largely ÆPTly ignored because such input is filtered out by trivial functions of the ASSS; such as baseline firing thresholds and neurons' refractory period (or their mere ceasing to fire through tiring).
Some past "cheers and boos" (involved in this metaphorical competition) were received recently in the lifetime of an ASSS, and so should be thought of as echoing in short-term memory; other more distantly received such input were conditioned-in and left behind as influential imprints early on (in the lives of individuals with enough of a neural ASSS to be ÆPTly analysed here).
Moreover, one aspects of "the audience" consist of epigenetically passed on effects of opportune and threatening challenges faced and exploited or coped with by ancestors at least as far removed as grandparents, and the remaining aspect to be ÆPTly addressed consists of naturally selective milieu factors that presented lifetime challenges that in the phylogeny of fauna affected and were obviously sufficiently met by each and every one of our ancestors.