A teaching instrument
Explore the science behind a feeling.
Enter a feeling or metaphor to explore literature-linked regions, confidence, and sources. Each result explains the limits of what those associations can tell us.
Runs in this browser. The citation engine maps your phrase on this page; the phrase is not sent anywhere. Live AI analysis is not available in this release.
More about where the phrase goes
Nowhere: matching happens in this tab against a fixed atlas of cited associations, and nothing is stored or logged. Avoid personal details anyway.
Interactive mapping needs JavaScript. If controls stay unavailable, reload this page or read the sources.
How the engine works
Switched off in this release. Your phrase is not sent to a server or an AI provider. A live option would return only after a separate review of the provider, privacy, budget and abuse controls.
A citation-grounded rules engine runs on this page, so the phrase is not sent anywhere. Every reading carries confidence bands and the same limitations.
Confidence is capped at moderate. No answer claims certainty, because reverse inference forbids it. The caveat is attached to every response by the engine code.
The region atlas
The regions the interface can surface
A schematic teaching atlas, not an MNI coordinate map. Each region is scoped to associations the literature supports.
Associated with working memory, planning, and cognitive control. In the cognitive-debt work, this is part of the network that disengages when reasoning is offloaded to AI.
Associated with linking emotion to value and decision making, and with self-referential meaning.
Associated with the integration of negative affect, pain, conflict, and cognitive control.
Associated with interoception, the felt sense of the body, and with disgust and urgency. Activation here does not prove any single feeling.
Popularly the 'fear center,' but meta-analysis shows it is not fear-specific: it responds to salience across many states, including sadness. The clearest case for reading it as an association, never a verdict.
Associated with episodic memory and the binding of experience over time.
Associated with reward anticipation, wanting, and motivation.
A central relay associated with routing sensory and motor signals across the cortex.
Part of the default mode network, associated with self-referential thought, mind-wandering, and rumination.
Associated with the planning and execution of voluntary movement.
Associated with hearing, and with the processing of speech and language.
Associated with early visual processing, including visual metaphor and imagery.
Associated with arousal, autonomic response, and defensive reactions such as freezing or the urge to flee.
Classically motor coordination, increasingly associated with timing and aspects of cognition and affect.
Every association traces to a source. See the full sources list.