Consciousness as a Slice: Avatars and Reality Without Lenses

Social Modulation of Cognition in the BrainLatam Framework

If you pause for a moment and observe your own experience, something becomes evident: you never perceive the whole world. You always perceive a world already organized.

Within the BrainLatam framework, consciousness is not a neutral camera.
It is:

movement that becomes perceived through the metabolism it generates.

In other words, consciousness is a position within mental hyperspace (the Damasian Mind), where interoception and proprioception define the slice through which the world becomes visible.

We call this position an avatar.

Avatars as Metabolic Slices of Reality

Each avatar is a mode of reading reality:

• Brainlly privileges neurobiology and brain energy.

• Iam reveals the affective landscape.

• Olmeca anchors culture and lived territory (Tekoha).

• Yagé expands the boundaries of the self.

• Math/Hep detects patterns and invariants.

• DANA reads the intelligence of life itself.

• APUS dissolves the separation between body and world.

• Jiwasa reveals the physiological “we.”

• Tensional Selves express functional positions of the self.

None of these avatars are false.
But all are slices.

Without slicing, there is no comprehension.
With slicing, there is no totality.

What recent neuroscience has confirmed

A major post-2021 shift in neuroscience is both simple and profound:
the brain does not operate in isolation.

The presence of another person reorganizes what we perceive as reality.

Second-person neuroscience shows that cognition in interaction differs fundamentally from cognition in observation — the other changes how perception and inference unfold (Lehmann, 2024).

Meta-analyses using hyperscanning fNIRS demonstrate measurable interbrain synchrony during cooperation, indicating that collective states are physiologically real (Czeszumski et al., 2022).

More recent reviews consolidate interpersonal neural synchrony as a key metric in teamwork, showing that collective cognition has its own dynamics beyond individual summation (Réveillé et al., 2024; 2025).

Even in primary bonds such as mother–infant interaction, neural coupling emerges during real-time engagement, reinforcing that first-person experience is always relational (Minagawa et al., 2023).

Studies using mobile fNIRS in real-world environments further demonstrate that cognition changes when it leaves sterile laboratory conditions and enters lived reality — where the presence of others becomes a central variable (Moffat et al., 2024).

Latin American contributions (core to BrainLatam)

The Latin American neuroscience community has played an important role in this shift.

A recent panorama of fNIRS research in Latin America highlights the growth of naturalistic and social paradigms, positioning the region as an emerging hub for real-world cognition research (Guevara, Mesquita & Orihuela-Espina, 2025/2026) [LatAm].

Additionally, reproducibility studies involving Latin American researchers emphasize methodological rigor in hyperscanning and social neuroscience, ensuring that interaction-based paradigms remain scientifically robust (Yücel et al., 2025, including Rickson Mesquita – UNICAMP) [LatAm].

These findings reinforce a central BrainLatam claim:
there is no consciousness outside of context.

Social Modulation of Cognition

The scientific term that best captures this phenomenon is:

Social modulation of cognition.

Within BrainLatam, however, it gains a deeper meaning:

The social does not only change what we think.
It changes the avatar through which we see.

Entering a collective does not merely alter opinions.
It alters the metabolic slice of reality itself.

Wearing the shirt of a group is adopting a shared lens.

Why groups both see and fail to see

This explains a common paradox:

Groups can be brilliant in certain dimensions
and blind in others.

Not because of ignorance,
but because of metabolic coherence.

The lens that maximizes belonging
also defines what falls out of focus.

Research on interbrain synchrony and teamwork dynamics shows that collectives stabilize patterns of perception and action. The collective becomes a regulatory field.

Avatars and BrainLatam Zones

This connects directly to the BrainLatam Zones:

• Zone 1 — functional execution (operational slicing)

• Zone 2 — belonging with preserved critical sense

• Zone 3 — capture by the slice (rigid perception)

Social neuroscience increasingly suggests that interpersonal synchrony can both enhance collective intelligence and rigidify cognition, depending on regulatory context.

In other words:
the mechanism is neutral.
The outcome depends on regulation.

Cognitive maturity

If every consciousness is a slice, maturity is not about finding the correct lens.

It is about noticing the slicing process itself.

Changing avatars without losing embodiment.
Inhabiting a perspective without absolutizing it.
Participating in collectives without dissolving critical awareness.

This is not relativism.
It is phenomenological precision.

A BrainLatam thesis

Reality is continuous.
Consciousness slices.

Avatars make the world intelligible.
But none make it complete.

Wisdom does not eliminate slices.
It learns to navigate among them.

And perhaps this is BrainLatam’s deepest contribution to contemporary neuroscience:

A mature consciousness is not the one that sees everything.
It is the one that knows it always sees from somewhere —
and remains open to the reality that exceeds any lens.

References (Post-2021)

• Czeszumski, A. et al. (2022). Cooperative behavior evokes interbrain synchrony. eNeuro.

• Lehmann, K. (2024). Active inference and second-person neuroscience.

• Réveillé, C. et al. (2024). Interbrain synchrony in teamwork. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

• Réveillé, C. et al. (2025). Trajectories of interbrain synchrony. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

• Minagawa, Y. et al. (2023). Mother–infant interbrain coupling. Cerebral Cortex.

• Moffat, R. et al. (2024). Mobile fNIRS and interbrain synchrony. Frontiers in Neuroergonomics.

• Guevara, E.; Mesquita, R.; Orihuela-Espina, F. (2025/2026). fNIRS in Latin America. Neurophotonics. [LatAm]

• Yücel, M. A. et al. (2025). fNIRS reproducibility and data quality. Communications Biology. [LatAm]