Glossary
21 neuroscience terms explained in plain language.
A
Alexithymia
A subclinical construct characterized by difficulty identifying, describing, and distinguishing between internal emotional states.
Allostatic Overload
A state where cumulative physiological stress exceeds the body's capacity for adaptive regulation, leading to systemic dysfunction.
Amygdala
A bilateral subcortical structure in the medial temporal lobe that processes threat detection, emotional salience, and fear conditioning.
Autistic Inertia
Difficulty initiating, switching, or stopping actions, related to executive function differences in task transitions.
B
Bottom-Up Processing
A perceptual strategy that builds understanding from individual sensory details before integrating into a global percept.
C
Camouflaging(also: Masking)
Conscious or unconscious suppression of autistic behaviours and presentation of neurotypical social performance.
Context Blindness
Reduced spontaneous use of contextual information to modulate perception, cognition, and social behaviour.
D
Double Empathy Problem
A bidirectional theory proposing that communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic individuals are mutual rather than unilateral.
E
Excitatory/Inhibitory (E/I) Balance(also: Brain Signal Balance)
The ratio of glutamatergic excitatory and GABAergic inhibitory neural signalling that maintains cortical homeostasis.
G
GABA
Gamma-aminobutyric acid — the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system.
Glutamate
The primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, essential for synaptic plasticity.
Gut-Brain Axis
The bidirectional communication network linking the enteric nervous system, gut microbiome, and central nervous system via neural, hormonal, and immunological pathways.
I
Interoception
The sense of internal body signals including hunger, thirst, heart rate, temperature, and visceral sensations.
M
Monotropism
An interest-based attention theory describing how autistic cognition tends toward intense focus on a narrow set of interests with reduced resources for peripheral processing.
P
Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)(also: Demand Avoidance)
A behavioural profile within autism characterized by extreme avoidance of everyday demands driven by anxiety-based need for autonomy.
Predictive Coding
A neurocognitive framework proposing the brain constantly generates predictions about incoming sensory data, with autism involving atypical precision-weighting of prediction errors.
S
Saraf(also: Nerve / Wiring)
The Malay word for nerve — the fundamental unit of signal transmission in the nervous system. The name of this platform, chosen deliberately to reclaim the word from the stigma of "sakit saraf" (crazy) and reframe it through sains saraf (neuroscience).
Sensory Gating
The neurological process of filtering and attenuating repetitive or irrelevant sensory stimuli to prevent cortical overload.
Spoon Theory
A metaphorical framework quantifying limited daily energy reserves as discrete units ("spoons") that are expended by physical, cognitive, and social activities.
Synaptic Pruning
The developmental process of eliminating excess synapses to refine neural circuits, which occurs differently in autism.
Z
Zeigarnik Effect
A cognitive phenomenon where uncompleted tasks are remembered more readily than completed ones, hypothesized to be amplified in autism.