From Attentional Capture to Shared Presence

Social Media, Metacognition, and Live Dance

The thumb moves upward across the screen.

One image disappears.

Another arrives before the first one has found an ending.

A threat.
An injustice.
A sentence designed to provoke anger.
A video asking for fear.
An opinion demanding an immediate response.

The body appears still, but something has already begun.

Breathing changes.

The jaw tightens.

The chest prepares itself.

Attention narrows.

Perhaps there is not yet a clearly recognized emotion. Perhaps you still cannot say, “I am afraid,” “I am angry,” or “I am outraged.”

But the body has already begun to feel.

Within the BrainLatam hypothesis, we may call this first shift a proto-feeling: an initial bodily change that has not yet been fully recognized, named, or transformed into a conscious feeling.

This formulation is inspired by the relationship between body, feeling, and consciousness developed by António Damásio in Feeling & Knowing, but the term proto-feeling, used in this specific way, belongs to BrainLatam’s conceptual framework.

The platform does not need to wait for you to understand what you are feeling.

It only needs you to keep looking.

Before Capturing Opinion, the Platform Mobilizes the Body

We often imagine that digital conflict occurs only in the field of ideas.

One person publishes an opinion.

Another agrees.

Another disagrees.

But before an opinion is organized, the body may already have been mobilized.

The content arrives.

The organism recognizes threat, novelty, desire, or conflict.

Attention turns toward the screen.

The proto-feeling gains intensity.

Then, perhaps, a more defined emotion appears.

Fear.

Anger.

Shame.

Pride.

A sense of belonging.

The desire to attack.

The need to defend one’s group.

When this happens quickly, the emotion may feel entirely our own, even when it has been carefully stimulated through images, phrases, edits, music, repetition, and recommendation systems.

The platform does not need to force anyone to remain.

It can produce conditions that make the body itself want to continue.

One video ends, but the mobilization does not.

Another piece of content arrives and gives the tension a new destination.

Attention remains captured because the body is still searching for completion.

The attention economy does not capture only the eyes.
It attempts to transform bodily mobilization into time spent on the platform.

5D Consciousness and Attention as a Resource

Within BrainLatam’s hypothesis of 5D Consciousness, experience does not occur only within the three dimensions of space.

It also includes movement and qualia.

The three spatial dimensions organize where the body is.

Movement organizes transformation, direction, and passage.

Qualia refers to the singular way an experience is felt: the quality of redness, pain, fear, proximity, music, or presence.

This model is a conceptual BrainLatam proposition, not a universally established scientific classification.

Within it, attention occupies a central position.

Attention helps select:

what enters;

what remains;

what gains intensity;

what becomes part of conscious experience;

and what may mobilize our next actions.

This does not mean that we can control every emotion.

Attention is not a perfect wall.

We cannot simply decide to stop feeling fear, sadness, or anger.

But we can create an interval between the body’s first movement and the response we give to the platform.

Metacognition emerges within this interval.

Metacognition Is Noticing That Something Is Trying to Make You Feel

Metacognition is often understood as the capacity to observe one’s own thinking.

Here, we need to expand it.

It may also involve noticing:

My body has changed.

My breathing has become shorter.

I feel a sense of urgency.

This content wants me to react now.

I do not yet know exactly what I am feeling.

Do I need to keep looking?

This awareness does not eliminate the feeling.

It restores the person’s participation.

Instead of asking only:

“Is this true or false?”

We can ask:

“What is this content trying to do to my Body-Territory?”

Is it trying to inform me?

To provoke me?

To sustain fear?

To produce outrage without offering any possible action?

To transform belonging into obedience?

To keep the body mobilized so that attention remains captured?

Metacognition then becomes a form of attentional consent.

Before giving more time, intensity, or emotion to the stimulus, the person can recognize what has begun to happen.

Digital content does not deserve to move my feelings and emotions without my metacognitive consent.

This sentence does not mean that digital experiences are false or irrelevant.

A message received through a screen may contain love, danger, violence, care, or important information.

It states something else:

the fact that a stimulus can reach my body does not automatically give it the right to direct my experience.

Three Indigenous Freedoms for Protecting Feeling

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow show that many Indigenous peoples of the Americas organized authority and freedom in ways that confused European colonizers.

Among different peoples, someone recognized as a chief could advise, represent, speak, or persuade, but did not necessarily possess the power to force others to obey.

We should not transform the enormous diversity of Indigenous peoples into a single political model. The central contribution is the recognition that leadership and coercion are not natural synonyms.

Within some of these experiences, authority depended on the ability to persuade.

Freedom included the real possibility of disobedience.

In provocative language:

The chief could be “make-believe.”
Freedom had to be real.

Graeber and Wengrow highlight three recurring human freedoms:

the freedom to leave;

the freedom to disobey;

and the freedom to reorganize social relationships.

These three freedoms can offer us a simple grammar for protecting feeling on social media:

I see, but I do not need to react immediately.
I participate, but I do not need to obey.
I can remain, leave, and return.

I See, but I Do Not Need to React Immediately

Seeing does not create an automatic debt of response.

The body may be mobilized.

A proto-feeling may arise.

But there may still be time to breathe, doubt, seek context, and perceive which response we genuinely want to offer.

Not reacting immediately is not indifference.

It may be a way of preventing another person or platform from choosing what we will feel next.

I Participate, but I Do Not Need to Obey

A digital community can offer encounter, knowledge, and protection.

But belonging becomes capture when it demands the same opinion, the same anger, and the same enemy.

Participating without obeying means preserving the possibility of thinking, disagreeing, and interrupting a collective reaction.

It means belonging without completely surrendering one’s attention.

I Can Remain, Leave, and Return

Leaving a conversation, turning off the screen, or stepping away from a platform should not mean losing the right to exist within the collective.

The possibility of leaving protects the freedom to remain.

And the possibility of returning prevents distance from being treated as betrayal.

A free relationship is not one we never leave.

It is one we can return to by choice.

Extended Yãy Hã Mĩy: Imitating Without Becoming Repetition

Emotions are also imitated on social media.

One person expresses outrage.

Others repeat the gesture.

The same expression appears on thousands of faces.

The same words become proof of belonging.

Repetition offers speed, but it may reduce perception.

Within the BrainLatam hypothesis, Extended Yãy hã mĩy proposes another passage:

observe → imitate → perceive → vary → transform

Imitation does not need to end in obedience.

It may become a stage of learning and creation.

The use of Extended Yãy hã mĩy is a BrainLatam elaboration inspired by encounters with Tikmũ’ũn/Maxakali knowledge. It is not a complete translation of their cosmology or an attempt to transform it into a neuroscientific mechanism.

Its strength in this text lies in one question:

After perceiving another person’s movement, can I create a response that is still my own?

The captured platform wants rapid repetition.

Attentional sovereignty needs time to transform.

Live Dance Restores Duration to Feeling

The theater lights dim.

A body enters the stage.

The gesture begins.

You cannot swipe the fall upward.

You cannot accelerate the pause.

You cannot immediately choose another body to replace the one before you.

The performance must pass through time.

The artist prepares, risks, makes mistakes, adjusts, and continues.

The audience also moves through this continuity.

Perhaps a sensation appears slowly.

Perhaps something that seemed like anger becomes sadness.

Perhaps tension finds a breath.

Perhaps the spectator cannot name what they feel.

Live dance does not need to demand a ready-made emotion.

It may offer time for the proto-feeling to be perceived before it is captured by a narrative.

That time returns a question to the Body-Territory:

What is truly happening to me while I watch?

On the screen, the next piece of content tries to answer before you do.

In the theater, silence may remain open.

Shared Presence Is Not Collective Obedience

Live dance can also capture.

An in-person environment may overwhelm through intense lighting, excessive sound, crowding, mandatory proximity, or forced participation.

The audience may feel required to applaud.

Someone may believe that disagreement means they failed to understand the work.

Another person may fear leaving because it could be perceived as disrespectful.

For this reason, physical presence is not automatically free.

Presence becomes shared when it preserves the three freedoms:

I can perceive without reacting immediately;

I can participate without obeying;

I can remain, leave, and return.

The choreographer or artist should not determine what everyone must feel.

They offer movements, rhythms, images, and relationships.

The audience produces different meanings.

One person approaches the work.

Another needs distance.

One becomes emotional.

Another remains silent.

One disagrees.

Another does not yet know what happened.

Belonging without obedience means remaining in relationship without giving the collective ownership over one’s own feeling.

The Body Chooses Again

The performance ends.

The lights take a few seconds to return.

There is not yet another video.

There is not yet a ready-made opinion.

There is an interval.

Perhaps you notice that your breathing has changed.

Perhaps you recognize an emotion.

Perhaps you notice only an unnamed sensation.

Perhaps you still do not know.

Not knowing can also be sovereignty.

Not every feeling needs to be immediately explained, published, or transformed into a political position.

Attention may remain with the experience until it finds another form.

Live dance will not defeat polarization or the attention economy on its own.

But it can offer a bodily rehearsal of freedom:

I see, but I do not need to react immediately.
I participate, but I do not need to obey.
I can remain, leave, and return.

And perhaps a fourth sentence should accompany the others:

Digital content does not deserve to move my feelings and emotions without my metacognitive consent.

This does not mean abandoning the digital world.

It means inhabiting it again with attention.

Attention as a resource.

Metacognition as protection of feeling.

The proto-feeling as a signal that deserves to be heard before it is monetized.

Movement as a possibility of transformation.

Qualia as an experience that continues to belong to the Body-Territory.

In the previous text, we saw that a collective can coordinate without requiring a central commander.

Now the question is different:

Can we create shared forms of presence in which no one needs to surrender their feelings to prove that they belong?

References and Their Contributions

Conceptual Reference on Feeling and Consciousness

DAMÁSIO, António. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. 2021.
Contribution: grounds the relationship among bodily processes, feelings, and consciousness. It inspires the discussion of bodily changes that precede conscious naming, although the specific use of “proto-feeling” is a BrainLatam elaboration.

Latin American Intellectuals and Anthropologists

KRENAK, Ailton. Ancestral Future. 2022.
Contribution: helps recognize territory, relationship, and continuity as living forms of knowledge, challenging the idea that the future must emerge from permanent acceleration and novelty.

CESARINO, Letícia. The World Turned Upside Down: Truth and Politics in the Digital Age. 2022.
Contribution: analyzes how platforms, algorithms, and digital environments reorganize subjectivities, publics, and political perception, supporting the discussion of attentional capture and polarization.

RIBEIRO JÚNIOR, Roberto Romero. “In a Strange Land: Dream, Difference, and Alteration Among the Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali).” Revista de Antropologia, 2022.
Contribution: preserves the autonomy of Tikmũ’ũn relationships among body, transformation, and experience, preventing Yãy hã mĩy from being reduced to a psychological or neuroscientific technique.

Freedom and Social Organization

GRAEBER, David; WENGROW, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. 2021.
Contribution: recovers Indigenous political experiences and highlights the freedoms to leave, disobey, and reorganize relationships. These freedoms provide the foundation for the attentional sovereignty proposed in the text.

Latin American Neuroscience

FITTIPALDI, Sol et al. “Heterogeneous Factors Influence Social Cognition Across Diverse Settings in Brain Health and Age-Related Diseases.” Nature Mental Health, 2024.
Contribution: shows that social cognition depends on educational, cultural, executive, and contextual factors, preventing emotional reactions and experiences of belonging from being treated as universal.

FRANCO-O’BYRNE, Daniel et al. “The Neurocognitive Impact of Loneliness and Social Networks on Social Adaptation.” Scientific Reports, 2023.
Contribution: distinguishes the quantity of social exposure from meaningful relational bonds and helps explain why digital circulation does not necessarily equal shared presence.

Latin American Choreography

CUBAS, Tamara. Multitud. International performances, 2022.
Contribution: investigates how many bodies can produce power, creation, pressure, and capture, showing that collective presence is not automatically freedom.

BrainLatam Hypotheses

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. 5D Consciousness: Three Dimensions, Movement, and Qualia.
Contribution: proposes a conceptual structure in which experience, movement, and the quality of feeling are connected, positioning attention as a central resource of conscious participation.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. Extended Yãy hã mĩy: The Body That Transcends Itself Through Imitation.
Contribution: proposes a passage from automatic repetition toward perception, variation, and self-authored transformation.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. From the Homeland of Obedience to the Homeland of Belonging.
Contribution: supports the idea that belonging should not require submission, emotional uniformity, or the loss of freedom to leave and return.

The central English formulation is: “Digital content does not deserve to move my feelings and emotions without my metacognitive consent.”