Auditory Approach Bias From Birth
Auditory Approach Bias From Birth
How newborns and young adults learn to move toward sound
(First-Person Consciousness • Decolonial Neuroscience • Brain Bee • The Feeling-and-Knowing Taá)
Republican Capitalism of Spirits Without Bodies
Decolonial Spirituality Capitalism Neuroscience
The Feeling-and-Knowing Taá — when hearing becomes movement
When I close my eyes and let a sound approach me—soft, rising, slightly louder with every heartbeat—I feel something ancient inside my body:
A tiny leaning forward.
A micro-tension in the chest.
A readiness that appears before thought.
It is as if my whole organism whispers: go toward it.
This is Taá in its auditory form:
knowing through feeling, long before conceptual understanding appears.
And this is exactly the kind of phenomenon explored by Ignatiadis et al. (2024) in Communications Psychology, in the study:
“Cortical signatures of auditory approach bias show stimulus-specific adaptation between newborns and young adults.”
(search keywords: “Ignatiadis 2024 auditory approach bias newborn EEG Communications Psychology stimulus-specific adaptation”)
Before we think, we lean.
Before we understand, we orient.
Before culture teaches us what to hear, the body already moves toward or away from sound.
A decolonial crack opens — What if even our hearing has been colonized?
Before entering the scientific details, I feel the need to loosen one knot:
I realize that even my hearing has been colonized.
The way I describe approaching sounds—danger, alert, attention—was trained by languages, metaphors, fears and social rules that were not born in this land, not born from my ancestors, not born from my body.
When Taá manifests, I notice that there is no separation between Neuroscience, Politics, and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, memory-life).
A newborn’s auditory bias is not “primitive”; it is wisdom encoded through millennia.
Colonial science tried to translate this into deficit, reflex, immaturity.
But every discovery like this opens a small window of freedom:
to hear again with the body, not only with imported concepts.
What the study asked
The authors investigated:
whether newborns already show neural signatures of auditory approach bias,
how these early patterns differ from young adults,
and whether the brain adapts to specific kinds of approaching sounds.
In other words:
Does the brain lean toward sound from the very beginning of life?
And does cultural experience reshape that movement?
How the researchers listened to the brain (EEG analysis)
The team used EEG with newborns and adults while presenting approaching and withdrawing sounds.
Signal processing pipeline (Brain Bee friendly)
ICA to remove eye movements, muscle noise, and cardiac artifacts.
FFT to decompose EEG into frequency bands (theta, alpha, beta).
PCA to reduce dimensionality and isolate components differentiating approach vs. retreat.
CSD (Current Source Density) to sharpen spatial resolution and reduce volume conduction.
Event-related potentials (ERPs) for newborns, focusing on early sensory components.
Time–frequency analyses to detect oscillatory markers of anticipatory orientation.
This gives the study one of the most complete pipelines for comparing newborn and adult cortical responses.
Main findings — We lean toward sound before knowing anything about the world
Newborns already show cortical signatures of approach bias.
Their brains respond more strongly to approaching sounds than withdrawing ones.Young adults also show approach bias, but in different frequency bands and with faster temporal dynamics.
Experience modifies the bias.
Adults show stimulus-specific adaptation — the brain learns patterns of approach and refines them.Newborns do not show adult-like adaptation, suggesting that approach bias is innate, but its tuning is cultural and experiential.
In short:
We are born ready to move toward some sounds.
And the world teaches us which ones.
Reading the findings with our concepts
Mente Damasiana
Approach bias emerges from interoceptive–proprioceptive coupling.
Even a newborn integrates body state + sensory expectation to prepare movement.
Quorum Sensing Humano (QSH)
A sound approaching is perceived as another presence entering the baby’s territory.
The body prepares to co-regulate or defend — an early quorum signal.
Eus Tensionais
Adults exhibit stimulus-specific adaptation because each life experience shapes a distinct “auditory tensegrity.”
Zona 1 / Zona 2 / Zona 3
Newborns operate mostly in fluid Zona 2 sensorial, open to the world.
Adults develop Zona 1 shortcuts (automatic interpretations).
Colonial narratives can harden these shortcuts into Zona 3 ideologies, telling us what sounds mean before we ever listen with the body.
Yãy hã mĩy — origin Maxakali
The newborn imitates rhythms of the world without knowing.
Approach bias is a form of “imitating the sound before knowing the sound.”
DANA (inteligência do DNA)
The auditory approach imprint is a biological offering:
a pre-cultural orientation toward connection.
Where the science adjusts our thinking
This study humbles us:
not everything we “choose” was ever chosen.
Hearing is not neutral.
Orientation toward the world begins before language, before culture, before self.
It also reveals how deeply colonial epistemologies misunderstand infancy:
seeing newborns as incomplete,
treating innate patterns as immaturity,
neglecting ancestral ways of interpreting early sensing as wisdom.
This work helps restore the dignity of infancy as a mode of knowing.
Normative implications for Latin America
Early-childhood policies should recognize newborns as sensory agents, not passive receptors.
Indigenous pedagogies that use sound, rhythm, and proximity can be scientifically grounded.
Urban noise regulation must consider that infant brains are shaped by auditory approach patterns.
Healthcare can use soundscapes to activate approach responses in preterm infants.
Artistic resonance — Latin American sound that approaches
The feeling of “a sound coming toward me” is beautifully captured in Atahualpa Yupanqui’s refrain:
“Caminar, caminar…”
A sound that invites the body forward.
It is also alive in Andean pinkullu flutes — where breath, distance, and approach are never separated.
Keywords for scientific search
Ignatiadis 2024 auditory approach bias newborn EEG stimulus-specific adaptation Communications Psychology
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NIRS fNIRS EEG ERP Multimodal NIRS-EEG
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