'It is ÆPT' to think of a brains (or a neural "Actention Selection Serving Systems" — maximally truncated to "AS" in order to feature right in the middle of EAVASIVE) as a "competition" between adaptively and functionally incompatible actention modules cheered and booed by "an audience" consisting of current as well as past environmental factors.

This metaphorical competition is one carried out by means of mostly unequally weighted mutual inhibition; however, actention modules ready to manifesting as a response of distress-type may contain a dedicated auto-inhibitory internal threshold function or it may be closely associated with an likewise threshold triggered interneuron.

 

What is "competed for" is nothing more than the prize of becoming an actention module that is situationally granted a temporarily dominant status.

However, some neurons in our ASSSs/Nervous Systems belong to neuromuscular functures of such vital importance that there is hardly ever any competing inhibitory influence. 

 

Even so, the activity of these crucially life-sustaining modules/functures (not least our cardiovascular and pulmonary functures) are also paid in the currency of neurometabolic resources.  

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The primary cost of such a metaphorical prize is the metabolic expenditure that allowed an actention module to manifest as a particular feeling or emotion/preoccupation/behavior.

 

An actention module may do nothing more than just abide, or exist as a potential but ontogenetically (developmentally) readied actention module.

 

However, when, or if, an actention module 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 it manifests as.

 

Different actention modules do of course consist of correspondingly different neural assemblies (or sensory-motivational and motor circuitries).​​