Memory of the Future in the City
Councilors as architects of local social metabolism

Consciousness in First Person – Brain Bee

(variables: interoception, proprioception, belonging, attention, self-narrative)

I was once just an egg.

No name, no ideology, no profile on social media. Just a cluster of cells floating in nutrients, receiving chemical and electrical signals from my mother’s body. Even there, the first Brain Bee consciousness variables were already in play:

• Interoception – my embryonic brain sensing rhythm, warmth, flow.
  
  

• Proprioception in potential – the body organizing axes and future movement.
  
  

• Affective belonging – I existed because another body was sustaining me.
  
  

Before the first word, I was already relation.

When I was born, the city entered me through the body: the noise of the street, the smell of gas in the kitchen, the light from the window, the cold or warm floor under my feet. In the pre-linguistic phase, I “read” the neighborhood with touch, hearing, smell, the safety of arms – not with arguments. My self-narrative had no sentences yet, only bodily states: fear, comfort, curiosity, strangeness.

Then came words, school, television. And finally, the smartphone.

Today, as a teenager, I wake up and the first thing I do is open my feed. My attention, another central Brain Bee variable, is pulled away from the sidewalk where I actually live. I see national scandals, global memes, culture wars – but almost nothing about the pothole on my corner, the open sewer, the absence of trees on my street.

My body still lives here, but the story of who I am has been outsourced to algorithms that tell me what matters to feel, think and hate.

If I mentally revisit my own becoming – from egg to digital city – I notice a mismatch: biologically I was formed to belong to a larger body, but culturally I was trained to perceive myself as an isolated individual competing inside an endless shopping mall.

That is where the idea of Memory of the Future begins to make sense: remembering that I was once pure dependence and belonging, so I can decide what kind of city I want to help build now.

Consciousness, body and social networks: drifting away from the real city

Contemporary neuroscience has been increasingly clear about how consciousness is organized from body to world. Research on interoception describes it as the capacity to perceive internal signals (heartbeat, breathing, hunger, tension) and links this ability to emotional regulation, decision making and sense of self.

At the same time, a wave of post-2020 studies has been mapping the impact of intense social media use in adolescence: more screen time is associated with higher rates of depressive symptoms, anxiety, body image distortion, affective polarization and lower well-being. Platforms built on engagement algorithms favor content that triggers strong emotions and confirmation bias, feeding bubbles and hostility between groups.

In the language of my concepts:

• My Mente Damasiana (the dance between interoception and proprioception) is pushed to the background.
  
  

• My self-networks are colonized by rigid ideological identities.
  
  

• My Eus Tensionais – my stable tension-selves – spend much of the time in Zone 3: a state of emotional hijack, fear, anger, resentment, guilt.
  
  

• Attention, which could be used to think about my street, my neighborhood, the city budget, gets drained into distracting agendas that barely change concrete reality.
  
  

Instead of using my brain to imagine the city I want to live in, I spend energy defending narratives that do not change a single garbage truck route, do not unclog a single drain, do not reorganize public transport, do not plant a single tree.

The 1988 Constitution and the city as a living organism

There is a point almost nobody explained to me in school: the 1988 Brazilian Constitution already treats the country as a social organism far more advanced than our everyday practice suggests.

In its Preamble, it declares the aim to establish a Democratic State intended to secure social and individual rights, freedom, security, well-being, development, equality and justice in a fraternal, plural society, without prejudice. In Article 1, it states that the Republic is founded on sovereignty, citizenship and human dignity, and in its sole paragraph it clearly affirms that all power emanates from the people, who exercise it through elected representatives or directly.

This is already a seed of a State JIWASA: power does not come from above; it emerges from the collective body.

Article 3 sets out the fundamental objectives: to build a free, just and solidary society; to guarantee national development; to eradicate poverty and reduce social and regional inequalities; to promote the well-being of all without discrimination. Article 6 lists the social rights – education, health, work, housing, transport, leisure, security, social security, protection of motherhood and childhood, assistance to those in need – all of which depend directly on how the city is organized.

In Articles 29 and 30, the Constitution defines municipal autonomy, the existence of a municipal organic law, and local responsibilities such as organizing and providing public services of local interest, and protecting cultural and historical heritage. Article 182 goes further: it states that urban development policy, carried out by the municipal government, must order the full development of the social functions of the city and ensure the well-being of its inhabitants, with the master plan as its basic instrument.

And Article 225 states that everyone has the right to an ecologically balanced environment, a common good essential to a healthy quality of life, and it imposes on the government and on the community the duty to defend and preserve it for present and future generations – an explicit principle of intergenerational justice.

When I reread these provisions through the lens of the Mente Damasiana, I see something else:

The Constitution is effectively saying that the city is a body with social functions, that the municipality is the organizing cell of this body, and that environment, well-being and the future of new generations are structural elements, not ornaments.

In legal terms, Brazil is much more “advanced” than our current neuro-political practice. The problem is not the lack of principles, but the lack of applied Memory of the Future and of representatives who see themselves – and are held accountable – as part of a State JIWASA.

Councilors as neurons of the city’s Memory of the Future

If I bring together:

• my own bodily becoming (from egg to teenager on the phone),
  
  

• what post-2020 neuroscience shows about interoception, attention and social media impact in youth,
  
  

• and what the 1988 Constitution already says about cities, environment, social rights and urban policy,
  
  

I arrive at a simple, powerful image:

The city is a living organism;
the municipality is its basic metabolic level;
the City Council is part of this body’s nervous system.

A JIWASA councilor would therefore be a neuron that:

1. Feels the city
   Not only through reports, but through contact with collective interoception: the bodies in the periphery, the bodies of the young, of workers, of the elderly.
   
   

2. Thinks long-term
   Operates with Memory of the Future, knowing that each municipal law alters the architecture of decades, like an “urban DNA” inscribed in the master plan and land use rules.
   
   

3. Legislates decolonially
   Actively dismantles the heritage of a politics built for the “standard citizen” of the Greco-Roman republic (rich, white, male, property-owner) and brings to the center those who have historically been treated as objects of favor, not subjects of rights.
   
   

4. Protects the social metabolism
   Connects the constitutional articles on social rights, environment and urban development to the concrete urgencies of the neighborhood, the river, the street, the school.
   
   

To do that, this councilor needs citizens who also stop seeing themselves as “city hall customers” and begin to recognize themselves as State JIWASA. Citizens who can use their Brain Bee variables – interoception, proprioception, belonging, attention, self-narrative – to notice when they are being pulled into Zone 3 of blind faith and polarization, and when they are in Zone 2, with enough energy to imagine, criticize and propose.

Closing: from Ego-Self to JIWASA Citizen

The 01s who live off the State understood something most of us haven’t fully seen:
if they control information channels, fund opinion leaders and keep our consciousness trapped in symbolic wars, they can operate a weak State, easy to capture, without organized citizen reaction.

The antidote is not more hatred, nor more blind faith.
It is more body, more consciousness, and more Constitution lived in the city.

When I return to my own beginning – egg, baby, child – I remember that:

• I only exist because there was a larger body that sustained me.
  
  

• I only developed because there was a minimum guaranteed metabolism.
  
  

• I can only talk about freedom because someone first took care of my survival.
  
  

Memory of the Future in the City is this, translated into the political level:
using what science knows about brain and body, together with what the 1988 Constitution already guarantees on paper, to demand councilors who act as architects of the local social metabolism – not just operators of short-term micropolitics.

The next step is simple and radical at the same time:

to stop acting as if “the State” were someone else
and start thinking, feeling and demanding as
State JIWASA in the first person:
“I am part of this body,
and I no longer accept that my future is planned without me.”

Some post-2020 publications that dialogue with this blog

• Chen, W. G., Schloesser, R. J., Arensdorf, A. M., et al. (2021). The emerging science of interoception: sensing, integrating, interpreting, and regulating signals within the self.
  
  

• Joshi, V., de Wit, S., Dolan, R., & Haggard, P. (2021). The role of interoceptive attention and appraisal in emotion regulation.
  
  

• Nagata, J. M., Cortez, C. A., Cattle, C. J., et al. (2025). Social media use and trajectories of depressive symptoms in adolescence.
  
  

• Montag, C., Sindermann, C., Elhai, J. D. (2024). Problematic social media use in children and adolescents: mechanisms and recommendations.
  
  

• American Psychological Association. Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence (2023).
  
  

• Ueno, D., & colleagues (2025). Interoception and its impact on cognition, emotion, and bodily experience.
  
  

• Recent work on echo chambers, confirmation bias and affective polarization in young voters, which helps us understand how digital environments shape political identity and attention.
  
  

Relevant articles of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution for “Memory of the Future in the City”

• Preamble – establishes a Democratic State aimed at social and individual rights, well-being, development, equality and justice, in a fraternal, plural society without prejudice.
  
  

• Article 1 and sole paragraph – defines citizenship and human dignity as foundations; affirms that all power emanates from the people, exercised through representatives or directly.
  
  

• Article 3 – lists fundamental objectives: building a free, just and solidary society; guaranteeing development; eradicating poverty; reducing inequalities; promoting well-being for all without discrimination.
  
  

• Article 6 – enumerates social rights (education, health, work, housing, transport, leisure, security, social security, protection of motherhood and childhood, assistance to those in need) that are heavily shaped by municipal policy.
  
  

• Articles 29 and 30 – guarantee municipal autonomy, a local organic law, and competence to organize public services of local interest and to protect cultural and historical heritage.
  
  

• Article 182 – states that urban development policy, carried out by municipal government, must ensure the full development of the city’s social functions and the well-being of inhabitants, using the master plan as basic instrument.
  
  

• Article 225 – recognizes everyone’s right to an ecologically balanced environment and imposes on government and community the duty to preserve it for present and future generations, grounding intergenerational urban justice.
  
  

These provisions are the legal backbone of what I am calling here Memory of the Future in the City: we are not inventing a new State – we are proposing to live, in the body, what the 1988 Constitution had already written for a truly JIWASA Brazil.