How Many We's Exist Within One I?

Consciousness, Belonging, and the Collectives That Inhabit Our Perception

When I Am Alone, Who Is With Me?

Imagine yourself alone in front of a screen.

You have just finished a multiplayer game. Your teammates are in different cities, perhaps in countries you have never visited. During the match, you anticipated movements, protected someone, and celebrated a collective victory.

Now the screen is off.

But something remains.

Your heart is still racing. You remember your teammates' voices. Perhaps you are still imagining what you could have done differently.

Physically, you are alone.

But is your experience of Being still entirely individual?

Consider another situation.

You need to make an important decision. Before choosing, you imagine what your mother would say, remember a teacher's advice, and consider the opinion of someone you admire.

No one is speaking to you at that moment.

Yet different perspectives are participating in your decision.

How many We's exist within that I?

The question may sound philosophical. But we can begin turning it into a scientific investigation.

The I Is an Experience, Not an Anatomical Prison

At BrainLatam, we propose understanding the Body-Territory as the indivisible unit of existence and, in our political conception, as a constitutive unit of the State.

This Body-Territory perceives, feels, metabolizes, learns, and acts. Its experience always unfolds under particular environmental and relational conditions.

When I say "I," I am not necessarily describing a brain disconnected from the world.

I am expressing a first-person perspective.

Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela, in dialogue with Humberto Maturana, contributed to an understanding of cognition as inseparable from the organization of living systems. Later, the enactive approach emphasized the relationship between organism, perception, and action.

We do not simply perceive a ready-made world and then decide how to act. Our possibilities for movement, attention, and interaction participate in the construction of experience.

In Brazilian anthropology, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro introduced another provocation through his discussion of Amerindian perspectivism: different beings may inhabit worlds experienced from distinct perspectives.

These are different fields of knowledge, and we should not reduce one to the other.

But both allow us to ask:

Is the I a closed entity, or a singular perspective continually constituted through relationships?

The Collective Can Exist in Experience Before It Exists in the Room

We can distinguish several situations.

In state A, I perceive myself predominantly as ONE. My attention is directed toward my own experience, thoughts, and decisions.

In state B, I experience the presence of other perspectives within my own experience. I remember voices, anticipate responses, and imagine conversations. This inner dialogue does not necessarily mean that other people or consciousnesses exist inside me.

In state C, I experience symbolic belonging. I may feel part of an ancestral, religious, cultural, or national community.

In state D, I participate in virtual collectives. Games, social networks, and avatars enable forms of coordination and identity that cross physical distances.

In state E, I encounter other Body-Territories in person.

But none of these states, by itself, guarantees the emergence of a true Jiwasa.

Someone may identify intensely with a community without having any opportunity to participate in its decisions.

Five people may gather together and continue merely following commands.

Thousands may repeat the same narrative without being able to question it.

Feeling collective, becoming synchronized, and collectively creating something are not the same thing.

The Man of Clay, the Man of Wood, and the Man of Maize

We can connect this discussion with the metaphors we have developed in dialogue with the Popol Wuj.

The Man of Clay may imagine that his experience stands above the world he inhabits. He feels separate, belonging to a different order, as though his existence could be understood independently of the relationships sustaining it.

The Man of Wood finds belonging through the reproduction of narratives. He may repeat an opinion, defend an identity, and carry out commands without necessarily participating in the construction of what he believes.

The Man of Maize allows us to imagine another possibility.

He learns from others but does not need to become a copy of them.

He participates, nourishes, and is nourished by relationships. He can imitate, differentiate himself, disagree, and continue to belong.

Here we encounter an important expression for BrainLatam:

Yãy hã mĩy — to imitate Being in order to transcend one's own Being.

Our interpretation is conceptual; we do not intend to replace the meanings belonging to Indigenous knowledge traditions with a neuroscientific theory.

The emerging question is simple:

When I imitate someone, am I merely reproducing behavior, or might I be learning possibilities that I will later transform?

When Two Brains Begin to Converse

Neuroscience can now simultaneously record the brain activity of people interacting with one another. These techniques are known as hyperscanning.

In 2025, Ivo Leiva-Cisterna, Paulo Barraza, Eugenio Rodríguez, and Guillaume Dumas published a study on multisensory stimulation and cooperation between participants.

In 2026, Marcos Domínguez-Arriola and colleagues examined how neural coordination relates to the perceived quality of natural conversations.

These studies broaden our understanding of human relationships, but they also reveal a challenge.

Two brains may exhibit similar signals because they are listening to the same music, watching the same image, or following the same rhythm.

That does not necessarily mean they are building something together.

A methodological study published in 2024 by Varlet and Grootswagers showed that conventional measures of interbrain synchrony may be insufficiently sensitive to the informational content actually shared.

We must therefore also investigate behavior, reciprocity, initiative, and opportunities to respond.

Perhaps a Jiwasa does not emerge when everyone exhibits maximum synchrony.

Perhaps it emerges when participants become capable of coordinating their differences.

The Body Participates in the Transition from I to We

Think again about a conversation.

You begin by focusing on what you want to say. Then you realize that the other person has understood something differently.

You interrupt your sentence.

You listen.

Your breathing changes. Your posture reorganizes. You modify what you intended to say.

The conversation is no longer the execution of an individual script.

Something is happening between you.

Breathing can accompany changes in attention, emotion, speech, and action. Heart rate also responds to internal and external conditions.

At BrainLatam, we explore these relationships through Biobehavioral Synchrony and Allostasis.

Allostasis involves processes through which an organism adjusts its functioning to anticipated or present demands.

This opens a new hypothesis:

The transition from perceiving oneself as ONE to feeling collective may be accompanied by a reorganization of respiratory rhythms, autonomic responses, and functional brain states.

But which change happens first?

Does breathing modify the experience of belonging?

Does collective experience modify breathing?

Or do both participate in a reciprocal dynamic?

We still need to investigate.

What If Some Connections Were Waiting for a Relationship?

In 2026, Roberto Lent, Fernanda Tovar-Moll, and Diego Szczupak presented the Connectomic Reserve hypothesis in the journal Brain.

The researchers propose that available anatomical connections may contribute to neuroplasticity and functional reorganization.

Their proposal does not mean they discovered connections specifically dedicated to collective behavior.

That is the new question we wish to formulate.

What if certain relationships created conditions for recruiting functional configurations that remain relatively underused when someone acts individually?

Imagine a musician improvising alone.

Now imagine that same musician playing with four companions capable of surprising one another.

The musician must perceive changes, anticipate responses, modify movements, and preserve their own participation.

No new anatomical connection has necessarily appeared.

But it may have become necessary to use the existing functional repertoire differently.

We call this possibility, still hypothetical, the Relational Connectomic Reserve.

Latin America Already Knows Other Ways of Being We

In Ancestral Future (Futuro ancestral), Ailton Krenak questions the radical separation between humanity and nature.

His reflections invite us to broaden our understanding of belonging to include rivers, forests, animals, ancestors, and territories.

Human collectives do not exist outside the environments that make their continuity possible.

In our conception, the Body-Territory participates in the Biome, just as the Biome participates in the conditions that sustain the Body-Territory's existence.

This brings us closer to a fundamental dimension of Jiwasa.

We do not seek to dissolve the individual into a greater identity.

We seek to understand how individual singularity can contribute to relationships that preserve and expand the possibilities of existence.

The We does not need to eliminate the I.

Perhaps it depends precisely on it.

Politics, Science, and Religion: Three Ways of Building a We

In Politics, we may feel that we belong to a nation while participating very little in the decisions that organize our lives.

The Jiwasa-State asks how belonging might become effective participation, with the freedom to question and modify norms.

In Science, a researcher may engage in an internal dialogue with authors they have never met. But when their hypotheses encounter other researchers, instruments, and unexpected results, new possibilities for knowledge may emerge.

In Religion, we may symbolically participate in communities that span generations. Secularism allows different beliefs and nonbeliefs to coexist without any one of them officially determining the possibilities of Being available to everyone else.

Across all these fields, we need to distinguish adherence, obedience, cooperation, and shared agency.

It is at this point that Jiwasa ceases to be merely a word and becomes a proposal for investigation.

How Could We Study This Transition?

Imagine five participants simultaneously wearing EEG and fNIRS systems, with ECG recordings and two respiratory belts each, alongside heart rate variability analysis.

First, each participant performs an individual task.

Then, each imagines the participation of other people.

Next, they interact in a virtual environment.

Finally, all five must solve a common problem, with the freedom to propose, disagree, and jointly modify their strategies.

We record changes in brain activity, breathing, cardiovascular regulation, and behavior throughout these transitions.

We compare responses to shared stimuli, commanded actions, and reciprocal interactions.

We seek to identify not merely greater synchronization, but new possibilities for action and functional configurations that emerge through relationships.

Demonstrating the actual involvement of reserve anatomical connections would require additional investigation.

We are not announcing a discovery.

We are proposing an experiment that Latin America can also formulate, conduct, and interpret.

How Many We's Exist Within One I?

Perhaps our opening question is still incomplete.

It is not enough to count the voices we remember, the collectives with which we identify, or the groups in which we participate.

We need to ask which of these relationships allow us to remain capable of perceiving, acting, disagreeing, and transforming our shared world.

The Body-Territory remains indivisible.

But its possibilities of Being do not necessarily end at its anatomical boundaries.

A relationship does not replace its brain.

It may modify the conditions under which that brain functions.

And perhaps some possibilities we have not yet exercised depend on encounters that have not yet happened.

We can respect our ancestors without confining our Being to the limits of their existence.

The question remains open:

What changes in the brain, in breathing, and in our possibilities for action when we stop perceiving ourselves solely as ONE and begin building a genuine We?

Annotated References

Lent, R.; Tovar-Moll, F.; Szczupak, D. (2026). The secret connections of the brain: a connectomic reserve for neuroplasticity?. Brain. Introduces the Connectomic Reserve hypothesis, providing the neuroanatomical foundation we wish to investigate under relational conditions.

Leiva-Cisterna, I.; Barraza, P.; Rodríguez, E.; Dumas, G. (2025). Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Research involving Chilean scientists on cooperation and interbrain dynamics.

Domínguez-Arriola, M. E.; Lam, P. C. H.; Pérez, A.; Pell, M. D. (2026). Interpersonal neural coordination tracks interaction quality during naturalistic conversation. NeuroImage. Investigates relationships between neural coordination and perceived conversational quality.

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral (Ancestral Future). Companhia das Letras. Broadens reflection on belonging, ancestry, and the continuity of life within a territory.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2004). Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na América indígena. O que nos faz pensar. Offers an anthropological perspective on different subjects and different ways of inhabiting and perceiving the world.

Varela, F.; Thompson, E.; Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press. A foundational reference for understanding embodied cognition in dialogue with first-person experience.

Varlet, M.; Grootswagers, T. (2024). Measuring information alignment in hyperscanning research: moving beyond interbrain synchrony. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Examines methodological limitations of neural synchrony as an indicator of shared information.

Hakim, U. et al. (2023). Quantification of inter-brain coupling. NeuroImage. Reviews methods for investigating coupling between brains, relevant to developing reproducible experimental protocols.

BrainLatam (2026). Jiwasa — Aprendendo e Ensinando num Eu Coletivo. Develops the distinction between collective coordination, participation, and shared learning.

BrainLatam (2026). Onde termina um cérebro quando começamos a agir como nós?. Explores the emergence of relational capacities through reciprocal action between Body-Territories.

BrainLatam | W44/2026 · Consciousness, Belonging, and the Jiwasa-State