Metabolism (also represented as Computation), refers to our method of processing information at the cortical level. It's a kind of "firmware" of our minds that is responsible for parsing data, and does not itself possess any innate data or opinion. Information metabolism is content-less, belief-less and opinion-less, but is instead the very mechanism through which we end up generating contents, beliefs and opinions at higher scales. 

Outside of a potential genetic definition of type, metabolism is the most essential description of what a type is. Cognitive type exists chiefly as a method of metabolizing information at the millisecond level, not by any particular informational content. It's about how we think, not what we think about.

Although metabolism is the most essential element of cognitive type, it is not the most straightforward to define. Unfortunately, our location at the center of our bodies does not gift us with any exceptional knowledge as to who we are and how we process. Attempting to type based on relating our self-perceptions to any metabolic profiles proves to be problematic, due to the way humans are not entirely aware of how we form our own thoughts. And due to how metabolism, by definition, precedes the creation of our own thoughts, it generates those thoughts only after it has already executed hundreds of micro-computations which we can neither see nor easily trace. We cannot see in enough detail how we form our thoughts, using our thoughts themselves.

To address this problem, identifying metabolism is done with the assistance of the second layer: vultology, which is able to bypass the problems of self-perception and read the way we metabolize information directly by how that metabolism produces byproducts in our body and face. A complementary method of metabolic identification is currently in the works, through the analysis of the linguistic products of cognition; an outsider view of how people say things, not what they say. CT is currently developing a linguistic analysis tool to assist in this process. In the meantime, below is a list of descriptions of how this information metabolism functions: