Prediction error enters the interoceptive network. By the time pressure reaches awareness, it has already been shaped by prior experience. This is the mechanism.
A signal doesn't arrive at consciousness labeled. When prediction error is generated — when what the brain expected and what actually arrived don't match — that mismatch enters the interoceptive network as something more like raw sensation: intensity, urgency, a quality of wrongness or aliveness, without meaning yet attached. The interoceptive network is the brain's system for receiving and processing information from inside the body. It is not passive. It is deeply predictive, already filtering and shaping the incoming signal against what it has learned to expect from past experience. By the time you feel anything, the signal has already passed through layers of prior-shaped processing.
From the interoceptive network, the signal moves to the salience network — the system that decides what is worth attending to, what is urgent, what requires a response. The salience network is where threat gets flagged and prioritized. Below and alongside all of this, subcortical structures — the amygdala, the basal ganglia, the brainstem — are adding their own contributions: emotional valence (is this good or bad?), action readiness (should I move toward or away?), and the procedural, implicit, preverbal qualities that shape how a signal feels before any word has arrived for it. The urge to run. The freeze. The pull toward someone. These are subcortical contributions to a signal that is still, at this stage, pressure rather than named emotion.
The signal is already interpreted before you interpret it. The question is not what you feel — it is at what level of that processing chain you can make contact with what is actually here.
What this means practically: the pressure you feel is not a raw readout of reality. It is a signal that has been shaped — by the interoceptive network's predictions, by the salience network's threat assessment, by subcortical contributions of valence and readiness — before it ever reaches the level where words and concepts become available. Working upstream means working with the signal at the pressure level, before the concept arrives and locks the experience into a predetermined story. That window is narrow. It is also where the most fundamental kind of change becomes possible.
Prediction error
The gap between expected and actual. Fast, sub-second, mostly below awareness.
Interoceptive network
Receives the signal from the body. Already filtering through prior predictions.
Salience network + subcortical
Urgency, threat-flagging, valence, action readiness. Preverbal and implicit.
Pressure
What the signal feels like before the word arrives. This is where contact is possible.
Meaning capture
The DMN assigns a concept. The experience solidifies around it.
Emotion · narrative · analysis
Downstream. Real and felt — but built, not received.
Critchley, H.D. & Garfinkel, S.N. (2017). Interoception and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7–14.
Craig, A.D. (2009). How do you feel — now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(1), 59–70.
Menon, V. (2015). Salience network. Brain Mapping: An Encyclopedic Reference, 2, 597–611.