Latent Heat - When Transformation Happens Without Appearing in the Most Obvious Variable

Perhaps B is already participating in A before we are able to perceive it

I place ice in a container.

It receives energy. The temperature rises until it reaches the melting point. I continue supplying energy, and something strange happens: during the phase transition, the temperature can remain practically constant while the ice begins to become water.

If we were observing only the thermometer, perhaps we would say:

“Nothing is changing.”

But we only need to look again.

There is ice. There is water. A is still present. B has already begun.

In physics, this has a precise meaning. During a phase transition, energy can be absorbed or released without appearing, during that interval, as a change in temperature. During melting, for example, approximately 334 kJ per kilogram are absorbed while ice at 0 °C becomes liquid water at 0 °C.

The temperature appears to remain the same.

The organization does not.

Perhaps this is the image we have been searching for throughout W40/2026.

What if we are looking at the wrong variable?

We need to maintain a clear boundary.

We are not saying that the brain has “psychological latent heat,” nor that consciousness or Metanoia obey the thermodynamic equations of water.

Latent Heat is a W40/2026 metaphor.

But it leaves us with a question that is difficult to abandon:

how many times do we conclude that nothing is changing simply because what we chose to observe remained the same?

Perhaps we are waiting for transformation to appear on the wrong thermometer.

We have already encountered something similar in this series. Hutcheon and colleagues observed that during the first 150 seconds of normobaric hypoxia, while SpO₂ was still falling, EEG–SpO₂ relationships appeared that differed from those observed after stabilization.

Hutcheon did not study latent heat. But the study keeps one question open: the final state does not necessarily preserve all the information about the path that produced it.

If we observe only:

A → B

we may miss:

A → A beginning to cease being A → A and B coexisting → B.

Perhaps much of transformation is hidden inside the arrow.

When exactly do we stop being awake?

I am awake.

Later I am asleep.

In the morning, the story sounds simple. But where did A end?

In 2025, Li and colleagues analyzed EEG data from more than one thousand participants and represented the passage from wakefulness to sleep as a trajectory. They identified bifurcation dynamics, a tipping point, and signs of critical slowing down before the transition.

Perhaps I recognize something of this experience: I can still hear the room, a thought begins to lose continuity, an image appears without my deciding to create it. Then I no longer know.

Hours later I say:

“I slept.”

B received a name, but almost the entire path disappeared from the narrative. Perhaps some Bs can only be named once they have become stable enough to be recognized.

“Always try to remember the future”

During one of my therapeutic experiences with ayahuasca, one sentence remained particularly vivid:

“Always try to remember the future.”

Now, in front of this ice, it returns.

How can I remember something that has not yet happened?

If memory means only retrieving a past event, the sentence seems impossible.

Perhaps we can remain inside the paradox.

The ice is still here. The water is too.

B has not fully arrived.

And yet B is already participating in the present.

Prospective studies in ceremonial ayahuasca settings have found associations between processes of cognitive reappraisal during the experience and later changes in psychological flexibility. This does not validate any content experienced during a psychedelic state as an external truth. It simply allows us to preserve a question: experience and integration may belong to different times.

Perhaps I do not need to decide where that sentence came from.

Remembering the future is not predicting the future

In the previous text, we encountered almost the opposite movement.

An expectation about B became certainty. B did not happen, and another B was produced to protect the expectation.

Perhaps remembering the future means precisely not doing that: not knowing B in advance, not forcing it to exist, but not forgetting that A is not the only possible configuration.

Maybe I still have the same name, the same home, the same work. From the outside, the temperature seems unchanged.

But a certainty has lost some rigidity. A question that once could not exist now remains with me. A memory has acquired another meaning.

If I observe only what I have always observed, perhaps I say:

“I am still the same.”

But am I?

“Being does not change; the being that changed remembers what was changed”

Another memory returns:

“Being does not change; the being that changed remembers what was changed.”

We do not need to transform this into an ontological claim. We can leave it between A and B and observe what it provokes.

After a transformation, I can look back and say:

“I was that.”

I thought that way, felt that fear, believed that explanation.

A does not need to be erased for B to exist.

Perhaps some continuity is necessary for us to recognize that change has occurred. If everything we had been disappeared completely, who would recognize B as different from A?

Perhaps Metanoia means changing enough to remember A without remaining obligated to reproduce it.

I can remember A without needing to become A again.

Epiphany: beginning or recognition?

Sometimes we say:

“It was at that moment.”

“Suddenly I understood.”

“That was when everything changed.”

Research on insight distinguishes the cognitive restructuring of a problem from the phenomenological experience of an Aha! moment. They can be related without being the same process.

Perhaps an epiphany is not always:

“B was born now.”

Perhaps it is:

“now I was able to perceive that A had already begun to cease being A.”

What appears sudden may have a trajectory.

When I say, “that was the moment I changed,” perhaps we can still ask together:

did the transformation begin there, or was that simply when I was finally able to see it?

Ancestral Future

Perhaps this is why “remembering the future” so easily encounters Ailton Krenak.

In Futuro ancestral (Ancestral Future), Krenak shifts the idea of the future as something simply placed in front of us. By suggesting that, if there is a future worth considering, it is ancestral because it was already here, he brings rivers, ancestry, territory, and continuity into what can still exist.

We do not need to say that Krenak was talking about the same thing as that ayahuasca experience.

It is more interesting to let the two ideas stand close without merging them:

Ancestral Future.

Remembering the future.

The past continues to participate in us through memory, language, body, territory, habits, and relationships. And what tomorrow we will call the future begins to be produced with that material now.

Perhaps the present is not merely a point between past and future.

Perhaps it is the place where both can touch.

Metanoia may begin before we know it has begun

Contemporary research describes transformative experiences as phenomena capable of producing lasting changes in our relationship with the self, with others, and with the world, but it does not offer one universal trajectory or neurobiological signature.

A 2024 review of transformative aesthetic experiences identified prior conditions, discrepancy, epiphany, insight, and later effects.

This helps us avoid turning Metanoia into a cinematic scene.

A ceremony, a conversation, a loss, a song, or a silence may be decisive. But B may continue forming afterward. The event may last hours; its integration may take months or years.

A → A + B → B

Perhaps our arrow needs to be redrawn:

A → A + B → B.

For some time, old habits and a new perception coexist; fear and curiosity; an earlier explanation and a question we can no longer push away.

We ask:

“Who am I now?”

And perhaps the most faithful answer is:

“It is not finished yet.”

The next movement of W40/2026 will encounter metastability — a concept that, in neuroscience, requires care and should not become a synonym for “being between states.”

For now, the question it announces is enough:

how can a system remain organized enough to continue existing and flexible enough to change?

Perhaps this is Latent Heat’s contribution: not to claim that every apparent stability hides transformation, but to remember that transformation and visible evidence of transformation do not need to happen on the same clock.

The thermometer can remain at 0 °C.

The ice is already becoming water.

Perhaps Metanoia has already begun before we know how to pronounce its name.

Perhaps epiphany arrives when we finally perceive it.

And perhaps we can preserve two sentences without closing them:

“Being does not change; the being that changed remembers what was changed.”

“Always try to remember the future.”

Not to guess B.

But to be present enough in A to notice when another possibility begins to exist.

A is still here.

B has not finished arriving.

And yet something fundamental may already be happening.

Perhaps we are not waiting for transformation to begin.

Perhaps we are already inside it.

Commented References

OpenStax. Phase Change and Latent Heat. Physics.
What this reference represents: it establishes the physical phenomenon that gives rise to the W40/2026 metaphor. During the melting of ice, approximately 334 kJ/kg can be absorbed while the temperature remains at 0 °C. The observed variable can remain stable while the organization of the system changes.

Hutcheon, E. A., Vakorin, V. A., Nunes, A., Ribary, U., Ferguson, S., Claydon, V. E., & Doesburg, S. M. (2023). Associations between spontaneous electroencephalogram oscillations and oxygen saturation across normobaric and hypobaric hypoxia. Human Brain Mapping, 44(6), 2345–2364.
What this reference represents: it brings Latent Heat back to the experimental question that opened W40/2026. During active desaturation, EEG–SpO₂ relationships appeared that were not the same after stabilization. The transient can carry information that a simple comparison between A and B may lose.

Li, J., Ilina, A., Peach, R., et al. (2025). Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic. Nature Neuroscience, 28, 2515–2525. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02091-1.
What this reference represents: it shows that “awake → asleep” can be described as a trajectory, with bifurcation, a tipping point, and critical slowing down. Between two nameable states, there can be a dynamic that disappears when we narrate only the before and after.

Agin-Liebes, G., Zeifman, R., Luoma, J. B., et al. (2022). Prospective examination of the therapeutic role of psychological flexibility and cognitive reappraisal in the ceremonial use of ayahuasca. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 36(3), 295–308. DOI: 10.1177/02698811221080165.
What this reference represents: it allows the personal ayahuasca memory to enter into dialogue with research without turning a subjectively meaningful message into external evidence. The event and what we are able to integrate from it later may belong to different times.

Wiley, J., & Danek, A. H. (2024). Restructuring processes and Aha! experiences in insight problem solving. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3, 42–55. DOI: 10.1038/s44159-023-00257-x.
What this reference represents: it distinguishes cognitive restructuring from the phenomenological Aha! experience. It allows us to ask whether epiphany is necessarily the beginning of transformation or whether, sometimes, it is the moment when we become aware of a reorganization that had already been unfolding.

Chirico, A., Pizzolante, M., Kitson, A., Gianotti, E., Riecke, B. E., & Gaggioli, A. (2022). Defining Transformative Experiences: A Conceptual Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 790300. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.790300.
What this reference represents: it provides rigor for discussing Metanoia without inventing a single biomarker or mechanism. Transformative experiences form a heterogeneous set and may alter the conception of self, worldview, and relationships with others.

Pizzolante, M., Pelowski, M., Demmer, T. R., Bartolotta, S., Sarcinella, E. D., Gaggioli, A., & Chirico, A. (2024). Aesthetic experiences and their transformative power: a systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1328449. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1328449.
What this reference represents: it identifies prior conditions, discrepancy, epiphany, insight, and later effects in transformative experiences. The moment we later call decisive may have a prior history and may continue producing consequences afterward.

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral [Ancestral Future]. Companhia das Letras.
What this reference represents: it offers an Indigenous Brazilian temporality that challenges the idea of the future as an empty territory located only ahead of us. For this text, Krenak allows us to bring “ancestral future” and “remembering the future” close to one another without equating them: what may still exist already encounters ancestry, rivers, territory, and relationships in the present.

Hancock, F., Rosas, F. E., Luppi, A. I., Zhang, M., Mediano, P. A. M., Cabral, J., et al. (2025). Metastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 26(2), 82–100. DOI: 10.1038/s41583-024-00883-1.
What this reference represents: it prepares the next movement of W40/2026. In neuroscience, metastability is not simply “being between A and B”; the concept requires precision and concerns the coexistence of coordinated integration with possibilities for more independent functioning. It leaves us with the question: how can a system remain organized without losing its capacity to change?

W40/2026 - Latent Heat, Homeostasis and Metanoia