Did Context Enter the Brain - or Was It Never Outside It?

For a long time, an important part of psychedelic research was organized around a seemingly simple question: what do these substances do to the brain?

That question produced relevant discoveries about connectivity, oscillations, modularity, diversity of neural states, and changes in the relationship between sensory and associative systems. But the study by Devon Stoliker and colleagues, published in Nature in 2026, allows us to shift the question: what happens to brain activity when the organism encounters different contexts under psilocybin?

And we can go one step further:

after each encounter, is the subject who arrives at the next context still exactly the same?

This is where the paper Psychedelics align brain activity with context becomes especially interesting for our concepts of 5D Consciousness and Body-Territory. Not because it demonstrates either of them, but because its experimental design makes it difficult to treat context as mere scenery.

The question the authors asked

The researchers studied 62 adults and combined fMRI and EEG across four conditions: rest, meditation, music, and film, before and during the effects of psilocybin.

Rather than looking only for average changes in brain activity, they used temporal analyses capable of representing neural dynamics as low-dimensional trajectories.

Under psilocybin, the authors observed a redistribution of functional integration and spectral changes consistent with previous findings. But the most original contribution appeared when they followed brain dynamics over time: the different contexts became more distinguishable in neural trajectories as the subjective intensity of the experience increased.

In other words, brain activity did not simply appear more variable.

It became more aligned with what was happening.

More entropy does not simply mean more disorder

Psychedelic research frequently uses concepts such as entropy, neural diversity, and reduced modular organization to describe altered states of consciousness.

In 2026, Bruno Moses, Manoj Doss, and Enzo Tagliazucchi published a critical review showing that there is no simple equivalence between greater brain entropy and greater phenomenological richness. Different entropy metrics measure different properties, increases are not unique to psychedelics, and important limitations remain when entropy is treated as a direct biomarker of consciousness.

The work of Stoliker and colleagues makes this caution even more relevant.

If we looked only at the weakening of some habitual forms of organization, we might describe the psychedelic state as simply more “disordered.” But when the authors preserved the temporal dimension, another form of organization emerged: neural trajectories carried more information about context.

Therefore:

less order at one scale does not mean absence of organization at another.

Context was not decoration

Music, meditation, film, and rest did not merely function as backgrounds against which psilocybin produced its effects.

They participated in the configuration being observed.

The music presented to the participant remains a physically identifiable stimulus. The film does too. Meditation follows instructions that can be experimentally described.

But what each of these elements encounters in the subject is not identical.

Music encounters memory.

Film encounters history.

Meditation encounters expectations, habits, discomfort, familiarity, and bodily states.

The encounter between subject and object changes the subject

In our text “Data Are Not Meaning,” we proposed a central formulation:

“The encounter adds a name to the object and a possibility to the subject.”

A sign does not arrive in an empty Body-Territory. It encounters experiences, habits, memories, physiological states, and representations that are already available.

This substantially changes how Stoliker’s study can be read.

We can describe four contexts:

music.

film.

meditation.

rest.

But those labels still belong to the external organization of the experiment.

The lived context emerges in the encounter.

The same music may recruit comfort in one person, grief in another, and religiosity in a third. And tomorrow, it may encounter a different Body-Territory from the one it encountered today.

The data may remain the same.

The possible meaning does not have to remain the same.

Therefore, the relationship may be described not only as:

subject → object → response

but as:

subject → encounter → transformation → new subject → new encounter.

The encounter between subject and object changes the subject who will encounter the next object.

Did context enter the brain?

Perhaps the question itself still carries a separation that needs examination.

To say that context “entered” the brain suggests two previously independent entities:

first, the brain.

Then, the world.

Finally, an arrow connecting them.

Stoliker’s study does not demonstrate that this division is false. But it shows something experimentally important: to understand certain neural configurations, we need to know the context in which they occur.

Removing context from the analysis means removing information necessary to explain the neural dynamics themselves.

This approaches our concept of Body-Territory.

In our proposal, territory is not simply what begins outside the skin. Light, sound, temperature, other people, language, history, rhythms, and material conditions participate in the possibilities from which the Body can configure itself and perceive Being.

The article does not prove Body-Territory.

But it allows us to ask:

if context is necessary to explain the neural organization we observe, to what extent can we continue treating it merely as an external variable?

Embeddedness: when the perceived boundary changes

The authors also found a particularly interesting relationship between contextual alignment and subjective experience.

Participants who reported more intense experiences of dissolution of the boundaries between self and environment also showed stronger alignment of brain dynamics with context. The authors use the term embeddedness to describe this feeling of continuity with the environment.

The study did not demonstrate that brain and environment become a single entity, nor did it discover a definitive “neural signature of unity.”

It showed something more rigorous:

the deeper certain subjective experiences became, the more clearly neural dynamics differentiated according to context.

5D Consciousness: attention does not create what it encounters

Here we need to preserve an important distinction.

In 5D Consciousness, attention does not create the stimulus or make something begin to exist within the Body-Territory. A difference may already be materially processed and participating in the organism’s configuration without dominating the attentional channel.

When a particular element recruits greater attention, it may gain greater functional weight and become more capable of reorganizing experience. But it does not emerge from nothing at that moment.

Context may already be participating before it is named.

The next context encounters another Body-Territory

Perhaps this is the most important consequence of our reading.

If an encounter transforms the organism, then the order of experiences stops being merely a methodological detail.

Music after meditation does not necessarily encounter the same subject that it would have encountered before meditation.

A film after an intense subjective experience may acquire different possibilities.

How much of the current state carries the previous state?

How much of the next encounter has already been modified by the encounter that has just ended?

This question goes beyond Stoliker and colleagues’ paper.

It is ours.

But their experiment creates space for us to formulate it.

Perhaps we called noise what we did not yet know how to follow

Science often searches for regularities that remain stable despite changes in the environment.

That is fundamental.

But perhaps there are forms of stability defined precisely by the capacity to change coherently with context.

In that case, stability would not mean remaining the same.

It would mean maintaining continuity while reorganizing.

Music begins.

Attention changes.

The perceived boundary between self and environment may change.

The neural trajectory changes.

And the Body-Territory emerging from that encounter no longer needs to be exactly the same as the one that entered it.

Perhaps the most interesting question then stops being only:

“What does psilocybin do to the brain?”

and becomes:

“What happens when a Body-Territory becomes more available to be reorganized by the context it encounters?”

And further:

“What will happen in the next encounter when the previous encounter has already changed the one who will encounter it?”

Stoliker and colleagues found organization where an earlier description might have seen only disorder.

Our reading adds another possibility:

context does not merely encounter the Body-Territory. Each encounter helps produce the Body-Territory that will encounter the next context.

Perhaps this is precisely where subject and object cease to occupy completely independent positions.

In the encounter, the object gains a new possibility of meaning.

And the subject gains a new possibility of Being.

References

Stoliker, D., Novelli, L., Khajehnejad, M., et al. (2026). Psychedelics align brain activity with context. Nature, 656, 936–947. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10910-z

Moses, B., Doss, M. K., & Tagliazucchi, E. (2026). A critical review of brain entropy as a biomarker of the psychedelic state. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 186, 106720. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2026.106720

BrainLatam. (2026). Dados não são significado: o signo só ganha vida no encontro. BrainLatam. https://brainlatam.com/blog/dados-nao-sao-significado-8571