Living Bubbles - Jiwasa, Transcendence, and the Return to the Planet

The screen transduces the world. The Body-Territory lives it.

A screen can show us a forest.

We can see its trees.

Hear birds.

Watch water flowing.

We can enlarge the image, record it, transmit it, compare it, and study it.

But we are not in the forest.

We are not simultaneously sensing:

the temperature of the air,

humidity on the skin,

the displacement of our own body,

the pressure of our feet against the ground,

the position of our joints,

changes in breathing,

smells,

balance,

the distance from other bodies,

nor what BrainLatam calls belonging.

The screen is not false.

It is extraordinarily useful.

But it is a cut.

Technology can represent life. It does not need to replace the experience of being alive.

From reality to bits — and from bits back to our senses

A camera performs transductions.

Light energy becomes an electrical signal.

The signal is digitized.

It becomes data.

That data can travel thousands of kilometers.

Then a screen converts digital information back into light, and a loudspeaker converts it into sound waves.

It is an extraordinary technological achievement.

But what returns to the Body-Territory is predominantly an audiovisual representation produced on a surface.

Even virtual reality systems that add visual depth, tracking, and feedback still select certain dimensions of experience.

For this reason, BrainLatam uses 12D not as a claim about the physical dimensionality of the universe, nor as a consensus that neuroscience recognizes exactly twelve independent senses.

It is our own perceptual cartography.

Beyond the senses traditionally taught, we consider modalities such as:

proprioception,

interoception,

equilibrioception,

nociception,

thermosensation,

internal chemoreception,

and, as a BrainLatam hypothesis, belonging.

Contemporary neuroscience provides strong foundations for several of these modalities. Proprioception participates in the perception of bodily position and movement; thermosensation has dedicated physiological pathways; and recent work shows how interoception and bodily signals participate in the construction of bodily self-awareness.

Chilean researcher Diego Candia-Rivera and colleagues argued in 2024 that multiple sensory modalities interact with interoceptive mechanisms and that bodily self-awareness must be understood through networks spanning brain and physiology.

Belonging, however, is not an established sensory modality in neuroscience.

That is precisely one of the questions for BrainLatam’s Decolonial Neuroscience.

The screen should serve Doing, not define Being

We do not need to reject screens.

We need to remember what they are.

A screen can help someone:

learn,

calculate,

build,

communicate,

diagnose,

program,

create,

find other people.

It is technology for Doing.

The problem begins when we spend so much time inside representations that whatever fits inside them starts defining what we believe reality itself to be.

A photograph of food does not nourish.

A photograph of a forest does not have the forest’s temperature.

An avatar does not contain the whole person.

A written conversation does not contain all the physiological changes occurring between two Body-Territories facing one another.

We cut things apart to learn, not to Be.

When another Body-Territory is actually in front of us

Now we turn off the screen.

There is another person in front of us.

They breathe.

Their eyes move.

Their posture changes.

Their voice produces pressure waves in the air.

There is physical distance.

Temperature.

Smell.

Silence.

Microexpressions.

Involuntary movements.

Our own heart continues to vary.

Our breathing responds.

We can move closer or farther away.

Some of these differences acquire qualia.

Others remain subperceptual.

This encounter is much harder to reduce to two dimensions.

It is a Living Bubble.

Not because two organisms become one.

But because two Body-Territory units begin sharing events without losing their peculiarities.

This is where Jiwasa returns.

Not as a biomarker.

Not as an Indigenous name for neural synchrony.

But as a phenomenological lens for asking:

when something happens in me and also happens in you, at what point can I perceive a “we” without needing to stop being “I”?

We can now measure two bodies at the same time

Social neuroscience is moving closer to this question.

Hyperscanning simultaneously records brain signals from two or more people during interaction.

But researchers linked to Universidad Diego Portales in Chile argued in a 2025 review that studying brain-to-brain coupling alone remains insufficient.

They propose embodied hyperscanning, integrating brain, body, and environment, while also noting that the field remains strongly concentrated in the Global North.

This resonates deeply with Body-Territory.

We can simultaneously record:

EEG,

NIRS,

ECG,

HRV,

respiration,

skin conductance,

movement,

voice,

gaze.

And ask not only:

did the brains synchronize?

But:

what happened to each Body-Territory during the encounter?

Synchronization does not mean transcendence

This distinction is fundamental.

In 2025, Chilean researchers Ivo Leiva-Cisterna, Paulo Barraza, Eugenio Rodríguez, and Guillaume Dumas experimentally showed that coordinated sensory stimulation between two people could increase interbrain synchrony and improve cooperative performance.

This is an important advance because it moves beyond mere correlation.

But synchronization is not automatically:

love,

belonging,

collective consciousness,

transcendence.

A recent meta-analysis found relationships between neural and behavioral synchrony, but much weaker relationships between physiological synchrony and behavior, as well as still-inconsistent relationships across neural and physiological levels.

A 2026 study added something fascinating: people synchronizing their breathing with one another showed greater interpersonal cardiac synchrony, while this convergence between organisms coincided with changes in cardiorespiratory coupling within each individual.

Perhaps bringing the “we” closer temporarily modifies some relationships within the “I.”

But this is still not transcendence.

Sometimes ritual can reinforce the local optimum

Here we need to allow first-person experience to enter science without turning it into proof.

In the author’s personal experiences during collective Tibetan practices, there were moments of intense repetition in a circle, accompanied by clearly perceived bodily changes.

The experience was real for that Body-Territory.

But an intense physiological alteration does not necessarily mean transcendence occurred.

Something else may happen.

The practice can amplify precisely the repertoire through which the person already perceives themselves to Be.

The mantra.

The movement.

The breathing.

The religious vocabulary.

Expectation.

The group.

Repetition.

All of these may increase intensity without necessarily allowing someone to leave the Local Optimum from which they already perceive themselves.

Brazilian researcher Alfredo Pereira Jr., through his proposal of Qualiomics, argues that first-person qualitative experience contains a dimension that cannot simply be replaced by third-person quantitative measurements.

BrainLatam adds:

an intense experience is not necessarily a transcendent experience.

Blind Faith can exist in religion, politics, and science

A person finds an explanation.

The explanation works.

It produces belonging.

It organizes suffering.

It creates predictability.

It becomes a local optimum.

That is not necessarily bad.

The problem begins when:

“this helps me understand”

becomes:

“only this can be true.”

That is our Blind Faith.

And it does not belong exclusively to religion.

There is religious Blind Faith.

Political Blind Faith.

Scientific Blind Faith.

Even a neuroscientific explanation can become jargon that prevents new perceptions.

When the cut created to help us learn starts completely defining who we are:

we lose Being while trying to fit inside the explanation we created about Being.

Transcendence, then, may not mean abandoning the body.

It may mean becoming capable of perceiving the boundary of the local optimum from which we had been perceiving ourselves.

DMT, ayahuasca, and breathwork: altering is not explaining

Altered states make this distinction even more important.

A Brazilian study published in 2026 by the Brain Institute at UFRN, with Natan Silva-Costa, Fernanda Palhano-Fontes, Dráulio Araujo, and colleagues, used a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled design with 50 participants.

Ayahuasca produced perceptual, bodily, emotional, and so-called mystical changes, accompanied by EEG alterations, especially a global reduction in alpha activity.

Studies with DMT also show profound changes in brain connectivity, cortical organization, and EEG.

This demonstrates that materially modifying the Body-Territory modifies experience.

It does not demonstrate that any specific religious interpretation of that experience is therefore true.

The same caution applies to breathwork.

A 2025 study showed that circular hyperventilation practices significantly reduced end-tidal CO₂ and that the decrease in CO₂ was associated with the intensity of altered states.

In 2026, another study found an average reduction of approximately 45.5% in global gray-matter cerebral blood flow during high-ventilation breathwork, without a significant group-level reduction in DMN connectivity.

Therefore:

an extraordinary experience can have an extraordinary physiology without physiology exhausting its meaning.

And what about near-death experiences?

Here humility needs to increase.

The AWARE-II study, published in 2023, identified organized EEG activity during resuscitation in some patients, including tens of minutes after cardiac arrest.

But it did not establish that consciousness exists independently of the brain.

A 2024 review shows that near-death experiences remain heterogeneous, difficult to study, and without one conclusive explanatory framework.

BrainLatam does not need to solve that mystery.

It can do something scientifically more interesting:

preserve the question without turning the absence of an answer into either scientific or religious Blind Faith.

NeuroChallenge: a Decolonial Neuroscience of collectives

Perhaps this is our next step.

Create a:

BrainLatam NeuroChallenge

Place small groups of Body-Territories in real and comparable situations:

shared silence,

gaze,

conversation,

chanting,

vocal repetition,

coordinated movement,

spontaneous breathing,

cooperative activity,

and equivalent versions mediated through screens.

Simultaneously record, whenever technically possible:

EEG and/or NIRS,
ECG and RespHRV,
thoracic and abdominal respiration,
end-tidal CO₂,
SpO₂,
skin conductance,
movement,
and first-person reports.

Do not look only for synchrony.

Also look for:

desynchronization,

delays,

transitions,

changes within each organism,

differences between participants,

and what each person reports having felt.

Embodied hyperscanning already points in this direction: we need to integrate neural, bodily, and environmental signals rather than merely compare two cerebral time series.

Then we could materially test questions such as:

When does reported belonging emerge?

Does belonging require synchronization?

Can belonging exist alongside desynchronization?

When ritual increases physiological intensity, does it also increase perceptual differentiation?

When someone reports transcendence, what changed within and between the Body-Territories?

Does face-to-face interaction generate different configurations from audiovisual interaction through a screen?

This could become a pathway toward what we might call:

A Social Psychology of Materiality

Not a psychology that reduces experience to molecules.

But a social psychology that does not forget that every relationship occurs between situated material organisms.

Perhaps transcendence means returning to the planet

We began this series by breathing.

We moved through CO₂.

Heart.

Brain.

Metabolism.

Time.

Internet.

DNA-Free Bubbles.

Work.

Attention.

Now we turn off the screen.

There is another Body-Territory in front of us.

And both remain inside something larger.

Atmosphere.

Water.

Soil.

Microorganisms.

Plants.

Animals.

Biome.

Planet.

Perhaps we have spent centuries imagining transcendence as a movement of departure:

leaving the body,

leaving matter,

leaving the world,

reaching another plane.

BrainLatam proposes testing another direction.

What if transcending does not mean leaving life, but deeply perceiving that we were never separated from it?

Jiwasa does not need to mean disappearing into the collective.

It can mean:

I remain peculiar,
you remain peculiar,
and we are able to perceive that our movements were never completely independent.

The screen may help us discover this.

Science may measure part of it.

Politics may protect the conditions for living it.

Religion may offer languages for giving it meaning.

But none of them should become Being itself.

Because:

We cut things apart to learn, not to Be.

And perhaps the final transcendence of this block is simply returning to the place we never truly left:

the living Body-Territory, among other living Body-Territories, within the planet that continues to pass through every breath.

Main References

GRASSO-CLADERA, A.; COSTA-CORDELLA, S.; MATTOLI-SÁNCHEZ, J.; VILINA, E.; SANTANDER, V.; HILTNER, S. E.; PARADA, F. J. (2025). Embodied hyperscanning for studying social interaction: A scoping review of simultaneous brain and body measurements. Social Neuroscience, 20(3), 163–179.
With strong participation from researchers linked to Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, this review proposes expanding hyperscanning from brain-to-brain toward brain-body-environment approaches and highlights the current concentration of the field in the Global North.

LEIVA-CISTERNA, I.; BARRAZA, P.; RODRÍGUEZ, E.; DUMAS, G. (2025). Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 20(1), nsaf104.
Chilean research provides experimental evidence that increasing neural coupling between partners can support cooperative coordination, without demonstrating that synchrony is equivalent to belonging or transcendence.

CANDIA-RIVERA, D.; ENGELEN, T.; BABO-REBELO, M.; SALAMONE, P. C. (2024). Interoception, network physiology and the emergence of bodily self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 165, 105864.
The Chilean researcher and colleagues integrate interoceptive signals, brain dynamics, and network physiology in the study of bodily self-awareness.

MARZORATTI, A.; EVANS, T. M. (2022). Measurement of interpersonal physiological synchrony in dyads: A review of timing parameters used in the literature. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 22, 1215–1230.
Shows that interpersonal synchrony can appear in cardiac, respiratory, electrodermal, and neural signals, but depends critically on temporal scale and methodology.

Multimodal interpersonal synchrony: Systematic review and meta-analysis (2025). Behavioural Brain Research, 480, 115369.
Finds a moderate association between neural synchrony and behavior, a smaller association between physiological synchrony and behavior, and still-inconsistent evidence linking different levels of synchrony.

PEREIRA JR., A. (2024). Qualiomics: The metaphysics of consciousness. Forum for Philosophical Studies, 1(1), 489.
The Brazilian philosopher and researcher proposes that first-person qualitative experience cannot be fully replaced by third-person quantitative descriptions, offering an important dialogue for protocols that integrate physiology and lived reports.

SILVA-COSTA, N.; PESSOA, J. A.; ANDRADE, K. C.; MOTA-ROLIM, S.; PALHANO-FONTES, F.; ARAUJO, D. B.; WIEßNER, I. (2026). Predicting and exploring ayahuasca effects: Perception, mind-wandering, and EEG oscillations. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 40(8), 1305–1320.
A randomized, double-blind study conducted at UFRN’s Brain Institute shows subjective and electrophysiological changes associated with ayahuasca, allowing so-called mystical experiences to be investigated without turning EEG findings into metaphysical proof.

TIMMERMANN et al. (2023). Human brain effects of DMT assessed via EEG-fMRI. PNAS.
Shows that DMT profoundly alters brain connectivity, network organization, and electrophysiological activity, reinforcing that major changes in conscious experience are accompanied by major changes in the material dynamics of the brain.

Decreased CO₂ saturation during circular breathwork supports emergence of altered states of consciousness (2025). Communications Psychology.
Shows an association between decreases in end-tidal CO₂ produced by deliberate hyperventilation and the intensity of altered states, making CO₂ an essential variable in breathwork research.

How high ventilation breathwork alters consciousness: Hypoperfusion, network dynamics, and subjective experience (2026). Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.
Found an average reduction of approximately 45.5% in global gray-matter cerebral blood flow during high-ventilation breathwork, but no significant group-level reduction in DMN connectivity, showing that subjective intensity cannot be explained by a single marker.

PARNIA, S. et al. (2023). AWAreness during REsuscitation II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest. Resuscitation.
Documents reports and electrophysiological activity during resuscitation and keeps important questions open about consciousness near death, without demonstrating consciousness independent of the brain.

KOVOOR, J. G. et al. (2024). Near-death experiences after cardiac arrest: a scoping review. Discover Mental Health, 4, 19.
Shows major methodological and phenomenological heterogeneity in near-death experiences, reinforcing the need to distinguish report, physiology, and metaphysical interpretation.

BrainLatam (2023–2026). 12 Senses / Belonging / Human Quorum Sensing.
Proposes an expanded perceptual cartography in which belonging is treated as a hypothetical twelfth sense. This remains a BrainLatam proposal to be investigated rather than an established sensory modality in neuroscience.

BrainLatam (2026). Decolonial Neuroscience NeuroChallenge.
Proposes studying real collectives through EEG and/or NIRS hyperscanning integrated with ECG, RespHRV, respiration, CO₂, and first-person reports, looking not only for synchrony but also differentiation, desynchronization, belonging, and transitions between local optima.

BrainLatam (2026). Jiwasa and Living Bubbles.
Uses Jiwasa as a phenomenological lens of shared agency: investigating how multiple Body-Territories may perceive a “we” without reducing their individual peculiarities into a collective mind.

“The screen transduces the world to help us Do. Transcendence may begin when we stop confusing that representation with the place where we can Be.”