Decolonial Neuroscience: The Science of the Body-Territory

What changes when the Body-Territory becomes the fundamental unit of knowledge?

For centuries, science has developed extraordinary technologies for understanding reality.

Mathematics expanded our ability to describe relationships.

Physics expanded our ability to understand movement.

Chemistry expanded our ability to understand transformation.

Biology expanded our ability to understand life.

Neuroscience expanded our ability to understand the processes that participate in experience.

More recently, Artificial Intelligence has expanded our ability to model patterns and process vast amounts of information.

Each of these technologies represents a remarkable achievement of human knowledge.

Decolonial Neuroscience emerges as an additional step in this journey.

It proposes a simple question:

Where does everything that science seeks to understand actually happen?

The answer is equally simple:

In the Body-Territory.

The Place Where Experience Happens

Every perception happens within a Body-Territory.

Every emotion happens within a Body-Territory.

Every memory happens within a Body-Territory.

Every scientific theory was created by a Body-Territory.

Every technology was conceived by a Body-Territory.

Every Artificial Intelligence system was designed by a Body-Territory.

Human experience always has a place.

It has temperature.

It has metabolism.

It has breathing.

It has posture.

It has history.

It has belonging.

It has territory.

For this reason, Decolonial Neuroscience proposes:

The Body-Territory constitutes the minimum indivisible unit of human experience.

DNA Intelligence and Technologies of Knowledge

An important distinction emerges when we observe the history of life.

Long before writing.

Long before mathematics.

Long before science.

Long before universities.

Life was already learning.

Already adapting.

Already generating solutions.

Already producing cooperation.

Already cultivating belonging.

Already expressing intelligence.

Throughout this series we have used the expression DNA Intelligence to describe this capacity of life to generate organization, adaptation, continuity, and new possibilities across generations.

DNA participates in the formation of tissues.

Organs.

Brains.

Body-Territories.

This intelligence generates life.

Generates experience.

Generates possibilities of existence.

Technologies Produce Perspectives

Technologies of knowledge perform a different function.

Mathematics creates perspectives.

Physics creates perspectives.

Chemistry creates perspectives.

Statistics creates perspectives.

Logic creates perspectives.

Science creates perspectives.

Artificial Intelligence creates perspectives.

Each illuminates particular aspects of reality.

Each offers a window.

Each expands our capacity to observe.

This capacity is extraordinarily valuable.

Through it we have developed telescopes, microscopes, satellites, vaccines, computers, EEG systems, fNIRS systems, and Artificial Intelligence.

Decolonial Neuroscience deeply values these tools.

At the same time, it recognizes:

Perspectives help us understand parts of reality.

The Body-Territory continues living the whole.

The Atlantic Forest Principle

Imagine someone walking through the Atlantic Forest.

Around them exist thousands of possibilities.

Roots.

Rocks.

Trails.

Animals.

Trees.

Clearings.

Streams.

A person who directs attention toward pathways, supports, and opportunities expands their capacity for movement.

Each discovered path opens new possibilities for exploration.

Decolonial Neuroscience adopts this principle as an epistemological orientation.

The central question becomes:

What possibilities are emerging here?

This shift reorganizes how we investigate mind, education, health, science, and society.

The focus moves toward pathways that generate movement, creativity, belonging, and critical awareness.

Utupe, Pei Utupe, and Xapiri

Throughout this series we proposed three concepts inspired by Yanomami traditions and reinterpreted within a neuroscientific framework.

Utupe refers to representational spaces within the Body-Territory.

Pei Utupe refers to representational spaces that participate in emotional experience and lived memory.

Xapiri refers to the qualitative dimension of experience—the brilliance, attraction, and felt quality that reorganizes attention and meaning.

These concepts offer a language for describing lived phenomena.

At the same time, they remain open to scientific investigation.

Jiwasa and the Collective Construction of Reality

No Body-Territory exists in isolation.

We learn together.

Create together.

Work together.

Belong together.

Decolonial Neuroscience uses the concept of Jiwasa to describe the shared spaces that emerge among Body-Territories.

Some Jiwasas strengthen learning, cooperation, creativity, and human development.

Others organize attention around particular interests and simplified views of reality.

Critical awareness emerges when we perceive both:

• the collective space;

• the lived experience of each Body-Territory composing it.

A healthy Jiwasa expands possibilities for everyone participating in it.

Science as an Expansion of Possibilities

Decolonial Neuroscience expands evidence-based science by investigating human experience where it actually happens: within the Body-Territory.

This perspective strengthens:

• observation;

• experimentation;

• replication;

• quantitative analysis;

• qualitative analysis;

• model building.

At the same time, it expands the questions we ask.

We begin investigating:

• which spaces are being recruited;

• which spaces are being strengthened;

• which spaces cultivate belonging;

• which spaces cultivate creativity;

• which spaces cultivate critical awareness;

• which spaces expand possibilities of existence.

Boundary Conditions

One of the greatest strengths of contemporary science lies in its ability to understand specific conditions.

What supports learning in one school may generate different outcomes in another.

What strengthens belonging in one community may assume different forms in another culture.

What promotes creativity in one context may produce different dynamics elsewhere.

This diversity enriches scientific inquiry.

Decolonial Neuroscience values precisely this ability to understand the boundary conditions through which phenomena emerge.

Scientific Materiality

The concepts developed throughout this series remain open hypotheses for investigation.

Their purpose is to generate richer questions and more meaningful experiments.

EEG allows investigation of how different spaces reorganize the temporal dynamics of attention, memory, and decision-making.

fNIRS allows observation of how different spaces recruit cortical metabolic resources during learning, creativity, cooperation, and reflection.

HRV, respiration, and GSR allow investigation of how different forms of belonging reorganize the physiology of the Body-Territory.

EMG allows observation of how experience shapes posture, expression, and movement.

Eye Tracking allows investigation of how active spaces guide visual exploration.

Multimodal Hyperscanning expands these possibilities further by allowing researchers to investigate entire groups constructing shared spaces in real time.

The scientific question evolves beyond isolated brain regions and becomes:

How do different ways of existing reorganize the Body-Territory?

And also:

How do different Body-Territories construct shared worlds?

The Future

Perhaps the main contribution of Decolonial Neuroscience is simple.

DNA Intelligence continues generating life.

Science continues generating knowledge.

Mathematics continues generating descriptions.

Artificial Intelligence continues generating models.

Meanwhile, the Body-Territory remains the place where all of these acquire meaning.

The place where we perceive.

The place where we remember.

The place where we belong.

The place where we create.

The place where knowledge becomes lived experience.

Closing Reflection

Decolonial Neuroscience proposes a science deeply connected to human experience.

A science that values the perspectives produced by technologies of knowledge.

A science that recognizes DNA Intelligence as the living foundation of existence.

A science that expands questions without reducing the complexity of life.

A science that perceives pathways, possibilities, and spaces for creation.

A science that investigates the Body-Territory as the place of perception, memory, consciousness, technology, and belonging.

Perhaps the scientific maturity of the future will emerge precisely from this integration:

Understanding perspectives.

Inhabiting the whole.

Producing knowledge that expands possibilities of existence.

References (Post-2021)

Barrett, L. F. (2024). Minds in Movement: Embodied Cognition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Dodig-Crnkovic, G. (2024). Rethinking Cognition: Morphological Info-Computation and the Embodied Paradigm in Life and Artificial Intelligence.

Bzdok, D., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2023). Grounding Cognitive Neuroscience in Real-World Contexts.

Liu, C. et al. (2024). Neural, Genetic, and Cognitive Signatures of Creativity. Communications Biology.

Dahl, C. J. et al. (2022). The Plasticity of Well-Being Through Mental Training and Contemplative Practice.

Grasso-Cladera, A. et al. (2024). Embodied Hyperscanning for Studying Social Interaction: A Scoping Review of Simultaneous Brain and Body Measurements.

Carollo, A. et al. (2024). Hyperscanning Literature After Two Decades of Neuroscientific Research.

Azhari, A. et al. (2025). A Systematic Review of Inter-Brain Synchrony and Social Interaction.

Chen, J. et al. (2024). A Cross-Disciplinary Review of EEG-fNIRS Dual-Modality Imaging.

Speer, S. P. H. et al. (2024). Hyperscanning Shows Friends Explore and Strangers Converge During Conversation. Nature Communications.

Vorreuther, A. et al. (2026). Reviewing Digital Collaborative Interactions with Multimodal Hyperscanning.

Parisi, G. (2021). In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems.