DNA, Territory, and Neurodevelopment - From Gestation to Death

What conditions allow a life to express its possibilities?

Before the first word, the first lesson, and even the first movement noticed by a family, a life is already in relation.

There is DNA, but there is also a uterus, nutrition, temperature, sound, affection, pollution, economic conditions, language, expectations, and a territory receiving whoever is arriving. Let us therefore begin by building the question together:

Does DNA contain a finished person, or does it offer possibilities that can only emerge through encounters with a territory?

Contemporary biology allows us to move away from DNA as a fixed destiny. Genes participate in development, but their activity occurs through cellular regulation and interaction with environmental conditions. Epigenetics studies mechanisms that can modify gene activity without changing the DNA sequence itself. This does not mean that every experience “rewrites our genes,” or that an epigenetic mark determines the future. It means that biology is relational.

The first thousand days — but not the only days

A group of Latin American specialists led by Roberto Debbag described the first thousand days—from pregnancy to a child’s second birthday—as a particularly important period for nutrition, immunity, growth, and neurodevelopment. They also emphasized how poverty, infectious diseases, inadequate maternal care, and unequal access to food affect this window across Latin America and the Caribbean. (Frontiers)

But let us ask another question together:

Does recognizing a sensitive period require us to believe that the door closes afterward?

A period can be especially important without becoming an irreversible sentence. The NeuroEducation of Weichö should resist both extremes: the idea that early conditions do not matter and the idea that everything has already been decided during childhood.

DNA encounters a world

Brazilian researchers Maria Clara de Magalhães-Barbosa, Arnaldo Prata-Barbosa, and Antonio José Ledo Alves da Cunha reviewed how intense or prolonged adversity, when experienced without sufficient protective adult support, can affect learning, behavior, health, and physiological stress-regulation systems. They also discuss epigenetic mechanisms as one possible part of this process, while recognizing that changes can be temporary or longer-lasting rather than automatically irreversible. (PubMed)

This allows us to formulate a first BrainLatam hypothesis:

The freedom of a life does not consist of escaping biology. It consists of encountering conditions in which its biological, affective, cultural, and creative possibilities are not unnecessarily restricted.

“Freedom of DNA expression” is therefore not a literal molecular statement. DNA has no intention waiting to be liberated. The expression is a conceptual window through which we can ask why some human possibilities are described as absent when they may never have encountered adequate nutrition, safety, language, stimulation, care, or belonging.

Neither genes alone nor environment alone

Karen Sánchez-Luquez, Marina Carpena, Luciana Tovo-Rodrigues, and colleagues studied more than four thousand children from the Pelotas birth cohorts in Brazil. Their 2024 research examined genomic factors, early childhood stimulation, and intelligence at six years of age. Both genomic differences and early stimulation contributed to the observed outcomes, but the findings did not support a simple account in which either genes or environment alone explains the child. (PubMed)

The usual question—“How much came from genes and how much came from the environment?”—already separates what life never presented separately.

Could we ask instead:

How are the possibilities of this DNA meeting this particular territory?

That territory includes more than a physical location. It includes food, family relations, books, spoken languages, violence, affection, digital technologies, air quality, expectations, and access to collective resources.

Inequality also participates in development

In Chile, Alejandra Abufhele, Dante Contreras, Esteban Puentes, Amanda Telias, and Natalia Valdebenito followed socioeconomic differences in child development from 2010 to 2017. Factors such as maternal education, books in the home, preschool attendance, and domestic conditions helped explain some developmental differences, but a substantial socioeconomic gap in receptive language remained. (PubMed)

This matters because a single educational intervention cannot necessarily compensate for persistent structural inequality.

When a child has difficulty learning, where do we locate the cause? In the brain? In the family? In teaching? In hunger? In fear? In the language used by the school? In the distance between the child’s knowledge and the knowledge the institution recognizes?

The NeuroEducation of Weichö does not deny individual differences. It asks whether the conditions surrounding those differences widen or narrow their possible expression.

Neurodevelopment does not end in childhood

Neurodevelopment should not be limited to childhood and adolescence. Throughout life, people continue learning, reorganizing strategies, building relationships, losing certain capacities, and developing other ways of participating.

Agustin Ibanez and a predominantly Latin American research network reviewed healthy-aging studies involving approximately 146,000 participants across the region. They found substantial differences among countries and weak generalizability of models largely developed in the United States and Europe. Their analysis reinforces that cognition and functional ability in later life are shaped by heterogeneous social, health, demographic, and territorial conditions. (Nature)

Another regional study involving more than 44,000 participants found that social determinants, mental health, and cardiometabolic conditions were strongly associated with healthy aging across Latin America and the Caribbean. The results challenge the idea that aging can be understood primarily through chronological age or individual lifestyle choices. (Nature)

A future that can also be ancestral

In Ancestral Future, published in 2022, Brazilian Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak disrupts the colonial assumption that moving forward requires leaving ancestral relationships behind. His thought invites us to reconsider development through relations among generations, territories, rivers, and forms of life that modern institutions have treated as resources or background. (Companhia das Letras)

We can now complete the central idea together:

DNA offers possibilities. Territory participates in determining which possibilities encounter conditions to emerge. Neurodevelopment is the continuous movement of this relationship, from gestation to death.

A Responsible State does not promise to manufacture perfect people. Nor does it attribute the effects of hunger, violence, pollution, and abandonment exclusively to genes, families, or individual choices.

It asks:

What conditions are we creating so that every Body-Territory can continue learning, belonging, and generating worlds throughout life?

And one question remains open for all of us:

How many capacities described as absent simply never encountered a territory in which they could become perceptible?

Commented references

Debbag, R. et al. (2023). Are the first 1,000 days of life a neglected vital period…?
The Latin American expert panel identifies pregnancy through age two as a critical period for nutrition, immunity, health, and neurodevelopment, while emphasizing the region’s unequal material conditions. (Frontiers)

Magalhães-Barbosa, M. C.; Prata-Barbosa, A.; da Cunha, A. J. L. A. (2022). Toxic stress, epigenetics and child development.
The Brazilian review explains how prolonged adversity without adequate relational support can affect stress-regulation systems and development, partly through epigenetic pathways. (PubMed)

Sánchez-Luquez, K. Y. et al. (2024). Evaluation of genomic factors and early childhood stimulation on child intelligence.
Using Pelotas cohort data, the study shows that genomic factors and childhood stimulation both contribute to cognitive outcomes without making either one an isolated destiny. (PubMed)

Abufhele, A. et al. (2022). Socioeconomic gradients in child development: Evidence from a Chilean longitudinal study.
The Chilean study finds that educational and family conditions explain part—but not all—of the socioeconomic differences observed in children’s receptive language. (PubMed)

Murray, J. et al. (2024). Life-course influences of poverty on violence and homicide.
Following a Brazilian birth cohort into adulthood, the study associates cumulative poverty—especially poverty in early adulthood—with later violence, challenging purely moral or individual explanations.

Ibanez, A. et al. (2024). Healthy aging meta-analyses and scoping review of risk factors across Latin America.
The review demonstrates that aging patterns are highly heterogeneous across the region and cannot be adequately explained through models derived mainly from the Global North. (Nature)

Krenak, A. (2022). Ancestral Future.
Krenak invites us to imagine the future not as separation from ancestry and territory, but as the renewal of relationships that sustain collective life. (Companhia das Letras)

Would a longer version explaining epigenetics, Body-Territory 5D, and the difference between neurodevelopment, learning, and aging make the central proposal easier to understand?