From Spirit to EEG
From Spirit to EEG - Utupe and Pei Utupe as a bridge between Spirituality Politics and Neuroscience
If the previous text began with the body as the entry point for understanding social collapse, the next step is unavoidable: we need a shared language capable of speaking about spirit, belonging, and suffering without falling into dogma or scientific reductionism.
The BrainLatam proposal is simple: move away from narrative disputes and return to what is closest to lived reality — the bodily states that organize perception, memory, and belonging before language appears.
The limits of inherited spiritual vocabularies
Much of contemporary suffering unfolds within frameworks inherited from historical periods that never faced algorithmic attention capture, digital identity fragmentation, or large-scale symbolic acceleration.
Institutional European Christianity, particularly between the 15th and 18th centuries, functioned not only as a religion but also as a technology of social organization. It structured guilt, hierarchy, obedience, morality, and belonging within specific historical conditions. This does not invalidate spiritual experience, but it explains why some inherited categories may no longer regulate contemporary forms of distress effectively.
Today’s challenges — algorithmic comparison, symbolic hyperstimulation, collapse of belonging — require conceptual tools that are closer to embodied experience.
If suffering evolves, language must evolve with it.
Utupe and Pei Utupe: an embodied grammar of spirit
Here, Amerindian concepts offer a powerful bridge.
Within Yanomami cosmology, a meaningful distinction exists between Utupe and Pei Utupe:
Utupe (Spirit) can be understood as an inner image-structure — analogous to semantic memory networks that organize meaning and identity.
Pei Utupe (Soul) emerges when these image-structures become emotionally encoded — resembling episodic, embodied memory.
This distinction dissolves the false divide between biology and spirituality. It does not ask whether spirit exists metaphysically; instead, it asks: how do internal images organize bodily states and decisions?
Within a Damasian framework, consciousness is not driven by abstract narratives. Rather, pre-activated bodily states determine which narratives become believable.
What contemporary neuroscience brings to the table
Over the last decade, interoception research has transformed our understanding of mind and self. The brain is not primarily a reasoning engine — it is a regulatory organ continuously monitoring internal bodily signals (Khalsa et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2021).
From this perspective, Utupe and Pei Utupe become empirically approachable constructs.
When inner images remain flexible:
reality updating is preserved,
meaning can be revised,
belonging remains dynamic,
and the organism returns more easily to integrative states (Zone 2).
When inner images rigidify (through trauma, chronic humiliation, ideological capture, or scarcity), the opposite occurs:
reduced updating,
reduced reinterpretation,
repetitive cognition,
and bodily contraction (Zone 3 dynamics).
Neurophysiological tools offer indirect windows into these processes.
Event-related potentials in EEG have been linked to reality updating and meaning revision (Berntson & Khalsa, 2021). Meanwhile, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) allows the observation of metabolic cost associated with sustained cognitive control and vigilance states (Gómez-Carrillo et al., 2023).
These tools do not “measure the soul.” What they do is reveal something more grounded: different symbolic environments produce measurable bodily costs.
The decolonial layer: when culture reorganizes physiology
If inner images regulate bodily states, then culture regulates interoception.
This is where recent Latin American research becomes especially relevant. Studies conducted in the Andes suggest that language and cultural framing reshape how suffering is experienced, expressed, and even structurally organized.
For example, work from Peru has shown that translating psychological instruments into Quechua is not merely linguistic adaptation but a transformation of the underlying emotional network itself (Flores-Cohaila et al., 2025). Other studies demonstrate that culturally adapted mental health tools in Quechua populations reveal different well-being dynamics than their Spanish counterparts (Carranza Esteban et al., 2023).
In BrainLatam terms, this aligns directly with APUS and TEKOHA frameworks:
belonging is not an opinion — it is collective physiological regulation.
When spirituality becomes observable without being reduced
This shift in perspective is subtle but transformative. Instead of debating whether spirituality belongs to religion or science, we begin to observe it as an embodied human phenomenon.
Under this lens, spirit is no longer a distant abstraction but a living dynamic of inner images shaping physiology.
Some images expand us.
Others contract us.
Some generate belonging.
Others generate fear or submission.
When these images become rigid — whether through trauma, ideology, or repetition — they stop being symbolic tools and become perceptual prisons.
From a Damasian standpoint, consciousness loses fluidity and operates within narrower predictive corridors.
Where religion, politics, and neuroscience truly intersect
At this point, the intersection becomes clearer:
Religion regulates inner images (Utupe).
Politics regulates belonging infrastructures (TEKOHA).
Neuroscience provides a language of evidence to evaluate their bodily consequences.
The relevant question is no longer “which narrative is correct,” but:
Does this increase fruitional awareness and metacognition?
Does it reduce trapped anergy?
Does it restore belonging without dogma or enemies?
These are regulatory, not ideological, questions.
Toward the next step
If we accept that belonging is mediated by embodied images — and that those images shape collective physiology — an unavoidable question emerges:
Who regulates the environments where Utupe and Pei Utupe are mass-produced?
This leads directly into the next discussion: the infrastructures of belonging in the 21st century — where digital platforms, economic systems, and governance models compete to shape the deepest layers of human experience.
References (Post-2021)
Interoception & Neuroscience
Chen, W. G., et al. (2021). The emerging science of interoception. Trends in Neurosciences.
Khalsa, S. S., et al. (2022). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
Berntson, G. G., & Khalsa, S. S. (2021). Neural circuits of interoception. Trends in Neurosciences.
Cultural Neuroscience & Systems Psychiatry
Gómez-Carrillo, A., et al. (2023). Integrating neuroscience in psychiatry: a cultural–ecosocial systems approach. The Lancet Psychiatry.
Gómez-Carrillo, A., et al. (2023). A cultural-ecosocial systems view for psychiatry. Frontiers in Psychiatry.
Indigenous Language & Mental Health (Latin America)
Flores-Cohaila, J. A., et al. (2025). Decolonizing mental health: native languages reshape depression networks in Peru. Scientific Reports.
Carranza Esteban, R. F., et al. (2023). Validation of the WHO-5 well-being index in Quechua populations. Heliyon.
