Breathing and Body-Territory -  The Rhythm That Accompanies Change

Imagine that we are walking through the Andes.

At the beginning of the climb, we can still talk without thinking about our breathing. Then the slope becomes steeper. Our steps become shorter. A sentence has to wait for the next exhalation. The heart speeds up. At some point, continuing upward requires something that seems contradictory: slowing down.

Not because the path has ended.

Because the territory has changed what we need to do in order to remain in it.

Perhaps this is one of the simplest ways to feel what, in the BrainLatam extension, we call APUS. Not only “where am I?”, but:

how do I need to change because I am here?

In Quechua-speaking communities of the Peruvian Andes, mountains may be recognized as Apus and may participate in relationships involving protection, water, cultivation, pilgrimage, and offerings. A recent ethnographic study on Apu Razuhuillca describes pilgrimages on foot and ritual relationships in which the mountain does not appear merely as passive scenery. We do not need to transform this cosmology into physiology. We can instead allow it to preserve a question that physiology also encounters:

do we cross a territory without being crossed by it?

As we climb higher, barometric pressure decreases, and the partial pressure of oxygen falls along the cascade that carries O₂ from air to tissues. In people newly exposed to altitude, this triggers changes in ventilation, gas exchange, circulation, and, over time, acclimatization. The mountain is not merely something we see; it materially changes what the organism must do in order to remain functional.

In the BrainLatam extension, APUS can therefore be understood as the relational dimension through which the Body-Territory positions itself and adjusts its action to the territory it encounters.

Slope changes gait.
Altitude changes ventilation.
Cold changes behavior.
Fatigue changes decision.

APUS is: I need to change in order to be here.

But this change is also felt. Breathing enters attention. The legs become heavy. The heartbeat becomes more noticeable. Heat appears, perhaps followed by cold. The need to slow down stops being abstract information and becomes a quality of experience.

This is where Tekoha helps us:

how is this relationship with the territory being felt and metabolized by the organism?

Respiratory interoception does not depend on a single “breathing sensor.” Recent reviews describe multiple somatic and visceral afferents, together with respiratory motor commands, converging in networks related both to discrimination and to the affective dimension of breathing.

When we feel, “I need to stop,” we are not reading a hidden screen displaying O₂ or CO₂.

We are feeling an integrated bodily configuration.

Samay: breathing, resting, and continuing

And then we arrive at a word that can deepen the walk: Samay.

In Quechua lexical records, samay appears in the semantic field of breathing, breath, rest, and repose. There are regional and linguistic variations, so we should not turn the term into a single definition for every Quechua-speaking community. Still, the proximity between breathing and resting is linguistically documented.

Samay does not mean CO₂.

And we should not transform an ancestral word into a biochemical theory it never claimed to formulate.

But it can help us notice something that the mechanical image of “air goes in, air goes out” leaves behind:

breathing also contains transitions.

We inhale.

We exhale.

And between one exhalation and the next inhalation there may be a spontaneous pause.

That pause is not a physiological void. Even when airflow temporarily stops, metabolism continues, CO₂ continues to be produced, and the relationships among CO₂, pH, and ventilatory control continue to change. Ventilation is regulated especially closely around arterial CO₂, and changes in CO₂ and related hydrogen-ion concentration are detected by chemosensory systems involved in respiratory control.

Perhaps, then, Samay — breathing and resting — allows us to formulate a contemporary question without colonizing its meaning:

Have we learned to breathe as if we always needed to add more air, when a healthy organism actually needs to regulate rhythm, volume, and pause according to metabolism and territory?

On the mountain, this question stops being abstract.

Muscular effort increases metabolic CO₂ production. At the same time, lower oxygen availability at altitude increases ventilatory drive. Greater ventilation helps respond to hypoxia, but it also lowers arterial CO₂ and raises pH, producing respiratory alkalosis. During acclimatization, the kidneys contribute to acid-base compensation, including changes in bicarbonate handling.

Regulation, therefore, does not seek to maximize a single variable.

It must negotiate relationships.

This also prevents an inappropriate conclusion: Samay should not be turned into a recommendation to hold the breath at altitude. The ventilatory response to hypoxia is an important part of acute adaptation.

The point is not:

breathe less.

The point is that appropriate breathing depends on the real condition of that Body-Territory.

Perhaps, then, the pause during the walk is not the opposite of the journey.

It may be the condition for the next step.

Samay: breathing, resting, and finding again the configuration from which continuing becomes possible.

Each breath also meets another brain dynamic

But breathing does not reorganize only gases and pH.

It is also related to brain dynamics.

Among the EEG studies guiding W40/2026 is the work of Daniel Kluger and colleagues, published in 2023. The researchers recorded respiration simultaneously with MEG and EEG and separated spectral activity into periodic components — identifiable oscillations — and aperiodic components, the approximately 1/f background over which those oscillations appear.

Both showed modulation related to respiratory phase, but with different temporal dynamics.

This matters because it prevents a simplistic picture:

the lung produces a rhythm → the brain copies it.

Breathing relates to different dimensions of neural activity, and those dimensions do not need to change together.

The next stimulus does not necessarily encounter the same Body-Territory as the one that arrived a few seconds earlier.

Breathing also participates in when we perceive

In 2026, Chalas, Kluger and colleagues moved further in this direction.

Participants had to detect visual stimuli near perceptual threshold while MEG, pupil size, and respiration were recorded. Visual sensitivity varied with respiratory phase. When stimulus timing was predictable, participants also spontaneously adapted their breathing patterns to the task, and stronger alignment was associated with better performance. The study also found respiratory modulation of oscillatory activity and functional flows within a network associated with interoceptive and sensory integration.

The experiment did not take place on a mountain.

So we should not claim that inhaling at a particular moment will help someone see a stone on the trail more clearly.

But we can ask:

can breathing, perception, and action become temporally coordinated?

Imagine the climb again.

You look for where to place your foot.

You assess the slope.

You feel the effort.

You change pace.

You breathe.

You look again.

You take the next step.

There is no simple line where territory ends and body begins.

The same path does not meet the same Body-Territory

The Latin American concept of cuerpo-territorio, developed in dialogue with Indigenous and community feminisms, already insists that bodily life, land, animals, plants, and territorial relationships cannot be understood as completely independent realities.

BrainLatam does not need to say that these traditions “already knew about respiration-brain coupling.” That would be anachronistic.

We can say something more respectful:

they preserve a relational question that contemporary measurements also make impossible to ignore.

Yet not everyone physiologically encounters the same mountain.

A 2025 review comparing Andean, Tibetan, and Ethiopian high-altitude populations shows that there is no single human adaptation to chronic hypoxia. Aymara and Quechua populations display ventilatory, circulatory, and hematological configurations that differ from those seen in other high-altitude groups — and also from the short-term acclimatization of newcomers.

The territory may be geographically the same.

The Body-Territory that encounters it carries a different history.

This makes APUS even more relational.

And it makes Tekoha more than “the inside”: it is how that history participates in present feeling.

One event, three aspects

Alfredo Pereira Jr.’s Triple-Aspect Monism helps prevent this integration from ending in a split between a physical body and a consciousness observing it from outside.

Within TMA, the materiality of the living body, dynamic patterns of information, and sentience are jointly necessary aspects of conscious experience.

On the climb, oxygen availability, CO₂ production, pH, circulation, and muscular contraction belong to the materiality of the event.

Respiratory, neural, and sensory patterns carry informational relations.

Breathlessness, effort, the relief of pausing, and the presence of the mountain belong to feeling.

They are not three worlds.

It is one Body-Territory happening.

Perhaps we can therefore define “breathing the territory” without leaving it as a vague metaphor:

Breathing the territory means allowing the conditions of a place to participate materially in the configuration of the organism, while that configuration changes the way we perceive, feel, and act in that same place.

The mountain demands.

The organism adjusts.

The adjustment is felt.

Feeling changes action.

Action places us a few meters farther ahead.

And everything begins again.

Perhaps Samay helps us notice precisely what almost never appears when breathing is described only as breaths per minute.

There is inhalation.

There is exhalation.

There is transition.

There is pause.

There is the possibility of changing rhythm before trying to preserve speed.

On the mountain, resting can be a way of continuing.

Perhaps homeostasis is also this.

Not remaining the same despite the territory.

Changing enough to continue existing within it.

And, between one step and the next, the Body-Territory breathes.

Commented References

Kluger, D. S., Forster, C., Abbasi, O., Chalas, N., Villringer, A., & Gross, J. (2023). Modulatory dynamics of periodic and aperiodic activity in respiration-brain coupling. Nature Communications, 14, 4699. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40250-9.
What this reference represents: this is the main neurophysiological foundation of the blog. It shows that both periodic and aperiodic components of brain activity vary systematically with respiration, but with different temporal dynamics. Respiration-brain coupling is not a single oscillator commanding another.

Chalas, N., Saltafossi, M., Berther, T., et al. (2026). Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling. Nature Communications, 17, 3261. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71604-8.
What this reference represents: it shows that respiratory phase, excitability, arousal, network dynamics, and perceptual sensitivity can become jointly organized. Breathing may participate in when, and in which bodily configuration, particular information is sampled.

Chan, P.-Y. S., Lee, L.-Y., & Davenport, P. W. (2024). Neural mechanisms of respiratory interoception. Autonomic Neuroscience, 253, 103181. DOI: 10.1016/j.autneu.2024.103181.
What this reference represents: it describes respiratory interoception as the integration of different somatic, visceral, and motor afferents. Feeling breathing is not feeling one isolated variable; it is feeling an organismic configuration.

Lyons, C., & Kevin, L. G. (2024). Respiration: control of ventilation. Anaesthesia & Intensive Care Medicine, 25(2), 112–116. DOI: 10.1016/j.mpaic.2023.10.010.
What this reference represents: it supports the relationship among ventilation, arterial CO₂, pH, and chemoreception. It helps explain why a spontaneous pause remains physiologically active even when airflow temporarily stops.

Berger, M. M., & Luks, A. M. (2023). High Altitude. Seminars in Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 44(5), 681–695. DOI: 10.1055/s-0043-1770063.
What this reference represents: it summarizes the adjustments produced by lower barometric pressure and reduced oxygen availability, including ventilation, gas exchange, circulation, and acclimatization. The mountain materially changes the conditions required for walking and remaining functional.

Getu, A. A., Ilardo, M., Tremblay, J. C., et al. (2025). Human adaptation to high-altitude: A contemporary comparison of the oxygen cascade in Andean, Tibetan and Ethiopian highlanders. Experimental Physiology.
What this reference represents: it compares adaptive responses among Aymara, Quechua, Tibetan, Sherpa, and Ethiopian high-altitude populations. There is no single human way of physiologically inhabiting altitude: Body-Territory also has a history.

Gutiérrez-Gómez, E., Auccatoma-Tinco, R., Quispe-Oncebay, S., & Olarte-Dávalos, K. T. (2024). La dimensión política en la preservación de lo sagrado en los rituales andinos. Cuestiones Políticas, 42(81), 126–143.
What this reference represents: a contemporary ethnographic study of Apu Razuhuillca and the ritual, territorial, and community relationships associated with the mountain. It allows APUS to remain grounded in its Andean relational genealogy without turning it into a neuroscientific mechanism.

D’Arcangelis, C. L., & Quiroga, L. (2023). Cuerpo-Territorio: Towards Feminist Solidarities in the Americas. Revista Eletrônica da ANPHLAC, 23(35), 150–174. DOI: 10.46752/anphlac.35.2023.4140.
What this reference represents: it situates cuerpo-territorio within Indigenous and community feminist genealogies in the Americas, emphasizing relationships among body, land, and other beings. Body-Territory has a Latin American genealogy that precedes our dialogue with EEG and physiology.

Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua. Diccionario Quechua–Español–Quechua / Simi Taqe. Lexicographic source.
What this reference represents: it places samay in the semantic field of “breath, respiration” and also “rest, repose.” This is an exception to the preference for post-2021 references, kept because the claim here is specifically linguistic. The source supports the semantic proximity between breathing and resting; it does not support a Quechua theory of CO₂, pH, or respiratory physiology.

Pereira Jr., A. (2023). Introdução à Metafísica do Monismo de Triplo Aspecto. ANPOF.
What this reference represents: it provides the ontological foundation for understanding the materiality of the living body, dynamic informational patterns, and sentience as jointly necessary aspects of conscious experience. Breathing, perceiving the mountain, and feeling effort belong to the same living event, not to separate worlds.

W40/2026 - Latent Heat, Homeostasis and Metanoia