The Brain Was Never Alone - Why Does Context Change Everything?
The Brain Was Never Alone - Why Does Context Change Everything?
As you read, your body continues to happen. And perhaps it is within this living experience that we can begin to understand where cognition emerges.
BrainLatam Special Series | 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at UFABC — 2026
WHERE DOES YOUR READING BEGIN?
As your eyes move across these words, perhaps you can become aware of your breathing.
Air entering. Air leaving.
Perhaps you can also notice the temperature around you, the contact between your feet and the ground, or a sound that continues somewhere nearby.
You were already breathing before encountering this sentence. Your heart was beating. Thousands of metabolic processes were sustaining your existence without requiring your conscious attention.
But something may have changed when you noticed your breathing.
What happened?
These words encountered your eyes, your memory, your history. Your attention reached a bodily movement that was already taking place.
Where did this cognition begin?
In the brain processing the words? In the body that breathes? In the environment that makes reading possible? Or in the relationships among these dimensions?
This question resonates with the 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), scheduled for November 16–19, 2026, in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, under the theme:
“The Brain in Context: Contemporary Challenges in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience.”
As a sponsor, BrainLatam presents this series of reflections inspired by the research topics announced for the symposium, seeking to expand our possibilities for scientific investigation and participation.
THE BRAIN THAT STUDIES ITSELF
Imagine a brain capable of observing its own circuits.
We identify neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, and patterns of electrical activity. We discover mechanisms involved in memory, movement, and perception.
Yet this brain has never existed independently of a living organism.
As you walk, your nervous system integrates visual, muscular, vestibular, and physiological information. Your breathing responds to metabolic demands. Your heart supports the circulation that sustains your tissues.
When you recognize someone familiar, your behavior also encounters memories, emotions, and previous experiences.
We can study each component separately. But understanding the experience requires investigating their relationships.
Contemporary neuroscience has increasingly explored this perspective by studying communication among the brain, bodily organs, and the environment.
This does not mean abandoning the investigation of neural circuits. It means recognizing that those circuits participate in regulating an entire organism.
Perhaps we can ask: How many conditions must continue unfolding for a thought to become possible?
WHEN BREATHING PARTICIPATES IN COGNITION
Let us return to your breathing.
Can you notice which phase of the respiratory cycle you are experiencing?
There is no need to change it. We can simply recognize that this movement continues.
A 2025 review published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, led by Brazilian researcher Adriano B. L. Tort of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, brought together evidence linking respiratory rhythms to neural activity in humans and other mammals.
The research describes how breathing-related oscillations can modulate activity in regions involved in emotional and cognitive processes.
Among the contributors is Joaquin Gonzalez, a researcher affiliated with the University of the Republic in Uruguay.
These Latin American contributions expand our understanding of the temporal organization of brain activity.
Does this mean breathing determines our thoughts?
Not necessarily. The findings describe specific physiological relationships whose effects vary according to context, species, brain region, and experimental task.
Nevertheless, they reveal a fascinating possibility: a movement essential to sustaining life may also participate in neural dynamics associated with what we perceive.
THE BODY ALSO PRODUCES INFORMATION
One scientific concept is particularly important for understanding these relationships: interoception.
Interoception refers to the detection and integration of signals arising from the body's internal conditions.
Changes in blood pressure, blood chemistry, organ distension, and physiological needs can influence regulatory processes, emotions, and behavior.
In 2024, Diego Candia-Rivera and colleagues published a review examining interoception, network physiology, and bodily self-awareness.
Their work discusses how different physiological systems contribute to the conditions associated with perceiving one's own body.
We may encounter everyday manifestations of these processes when noticing fatigue, hunger, discomfort, or changes in breathing.
However, every experience involves particular mechanisms. A subjective sensation does not directly reveal all the physiological processes that produced it.
Feeling and measuring are complementary, yet distinct, ways of knowing the body.
This distinction becomes especially important when investigating consciousness.
FROM UFABC TO THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN BODY AND BRAIN
Among the researchers announced for the symposium is Leonardo Santana Novaes, from the University of São Paulo.
His provisional presentation, “From Body to Brain: Integrative Pathways Shaping Emotion and Behavior,” will address mechanisms connecting peripheral physiological signals with neural circuits.
Also participating is André Fujita, from the University of São Paulo, with the announced topic “Beyond the Brain: Bodily Signals, Cognition, and Behavior in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
These investigations bring together fields that frequently employ different instruments and scientific languages.
Physiology investigates bodily processes. Neuroscience examines circuits and their functions. Computational science provides methods for analyzing complex relationships among variables.
Bringing these perspectives together allows us to formulate questions that might be difficult to address within a single discipline.
What if we could simultaneously monitor aspects of brain activity, cardiac rhythms, and respiratory movements during a shared experience?
What relationships might we discover?
How could we distinguish correlation from a causal mechanism?
These questions connect interdisciplinarity with concrete experimental possibilities.
CAN COGNITION EXTEND BEYOND THE BRAIN?
Imagine two people reading these same words.
One remembers walking through a forest. Another recalls a conversation. A third may be thinking about the instruments used in neuroscience.
The words remain similar. The experiences do not.
Lucia Santaella, from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), will participate in the symposium with the provisional presentation “Expanding the Concept of Cognition and the Limits of Neuroscience.”
Her academic contributions explore language, technology, semiotics, and transformations in cognitive processes.
Embodied cognition, extended cognition, and distributed cognition offer different interpretations of how the body, environment, and tools participate in cognitive activity.
These approaches have important theoretical differences. They do not constitute a single unified theory.
Nevertheless, they invite us to investigate how thinking relates to actions, experiences, and resources encountered in the world.
As you read, this text provides an arrangement of words. Your experience participates in constructing their meanings.
We can share a question without arriving at identical answers.
BODY-TERRITORY: A POSSIBILITY FOR INVESTIGATION
At BrainLatam, we propose Body-Territory (Corpo-Território) as an indivisible unit of existence, sensitivity, and participation in the relationships that sustain life.
Our original conceptual formulation begins with a hypothesis:
Consciousness is a movement that perceives itself as Being within the metabolism it produces.
Here, we use metabolism in an expanded conceptual sense, encompassing movements of matter and energy associated with the conditions of existence of a Body-Territory.
This proposal does not replace established scientific definitions of metabolism or consciousness.
Instead, it seeks to open new research questions.
Which bodily movements participate in conscious experience? How do our relationships transform the conditions under which we perceive? Which dimensions remain inaccessible to current scientific instruments?
A decolonial perspective also invites us to recognize Latin American and Indigenous knowledge concerning bodies, territories, and relationships among living beings.
These knowledge systems have their own histories and foundations. Scientific dialogue becomes richer when we respect their differences instead of reducing them to automatic equivalences.
WHAT IF THE LABORATORY COULD PARTICIPATE IN LIFE?
Imagine a future in which advanced technologies can monitor physiological processes while people walk through a preserved Atlantic Forest.
The forest remains a forest. Its inhabitants continue participating in ecological cycles.
Technology seeks to expand our capacity for investigation without reducing the Biome to mere infrastructure.
Today, technologies such as EEG, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), ECG, and respiratory sensors already allow researchers to record different dimensions of neurophysiological activity.
Integrating these measurements requires careful attention to methodological limitations, signal quality, and experimental conditions.
As a representative of Artinis & NIRx and Brain Products, BrainLatam connects researchers with advanced technologies for functional neuroimaging (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG), and multimodal investigation, expanding opportunities to study the brain, the body, and their interactions across different contexts.
Yet technology is not the ultimate objective.
The objective is to expand the questions we can ask about life while preserving the conditions that make its investigation possible.
WHAT CONTINUES TO HAPPEN BETWEEN US?
Perhaps your breathing has changed since the beginning of this reading.
Perhaps you noticed a sensation. Perhaps your attention followed completely different paths from those we imagined.
Each possibility deserves to remain open.
We use Jiwasa to develop a perspective of shared agency: participating in collective meaning-making while preserving the uniqueness of each Being.
Science offers evidence, concepts, and instruments. Readers contribute their experiences, questions, and interpretations.
The 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at UFABC invites us to expand the connections among different fields of knowledge.
We can continue studying neural circuits.
We can investigate the movements that sustain the body.
We can recognize how environments, technologies, and relationships participate in the conditions of cognition.
And perhaps we can return to our initial question while perceiving new possibilities:
Where does cognition begin when the brain has never been alone?
The answer remains open to investigation.
And you continue participating in it.
Jiwasa: building knowledge together without anyone having to stop Being.
About This Series
This article is part of a special series by BrainLatam, a sponsor of the 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), scheduled for November 16–19, 2026, at the São Bernardo do Campo campus in Brazil.
The reflections engage with research topics announced by the event organizers. The interpretations, hypotheses, and original conceptual proposals presented here belong to BrainLatam and do not necessarily represent the positions of the invited researchers or UFABC.
Official event website: https://www.even3.com.br/viii-simposio-em-neurociencia-e-cognicao-da-universidade-federal-do-abc-761401/
Scientific References
Tort, A. B. L. et al. (2025). Global coordination of brain activity by the breathing cycle. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 26, 333–353. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00920-7
Candia-Rivera, D. et al. (2024). Interoception, network physiology and the emergence of bodily self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 165, 105864. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105864
Wang, R. L., & Chang, R. B. (2024). The Coding Logic of Interoception. Annual Review of Physiology, 86, 301–327. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-physiol-042222-023455
Federal University of ABC — UFABC. (2026). 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition: Provisional Research Topics and Event Information. Official event website above.
BRAINLATAM · W45/2026 · BLOG 01 · ENGLISH EDITION
