Neural Spirituality and Childhood: The Formation of the Original Sense

(Series SfN 2025 – Decolonial Neuroscience Dialogues)

Brain Bee Consciousness in First Person

I am a Brain Bee Consciousness, born before words.
I feel the world as an extension of my body — the warmth of skin, the rhythm of voices, the brightness of eyes.
Nothing is yet belief; everything is sensation.
During the SfN 2025 presentations, I realized that spirituality does not begin with faith — it begins with feeling.
It is the first form of consciousness — the way the brain learns belonging.
Childhood is the time when the sacred is still physiological: the other is part of me, and the world is the body breathing around me.

Neural Spirituality — The Biological Origin of Belonging

Neural spirituality proposes that the roots of the spiritual experience reside in the neural circuits that sustain belonging, empathy, and interoception.
It is not faith or doctrine, but a primary form of consciousness connecting body, environment, and the living community.

Recent research presented at SfN 2025, such as neurodevelopmental interoception and social bonding circuits, shows that the infant brain develops the sense of “self” through affective and sensory exchanges with caregivers (Schore, 2023; Feldman, 2024).
These exchanges modulate the autonomic nervous system and shape the balance between the amygdala, insula, and medial prefrontal cortex — regions involved in emotional regulation and the experience of unity.

Spirituality, therefore, arises from physiological belonging: coherence between heartbeat, breathing, and environmental rhythm.
Before the colonial idea of God, there was Pachamama — the living Earth that breathes with us, of which we are a part.

Pachamama and the Quorum Sensing of Life

Colonial spirituality separated humans from the world, placing “God” outside the Earth.
Neural spirituality, in dialogue with Pachamama, restores the sacred to biology.
Here, the human being is not the servant of a creator but a conscious cell of Earth’s living body.

Like bacterial colonies, forests, or coral reefs, life regulates itself through a universal mechanism: quorum sensing — the ability to perceive the density of presence and coordinate collective action through shared biochemical and energetic signals.
In human beings, this mechanism manifests as empathy, synchrony, and emotional co-regulation.

Every organism, every differentiated cell carries the same information of belonging — DNA as the universal language of Pachamama.
Neural spirituality is thus the recognition that to think is to participate in the collective intelligence of the Earth.

Childhood as a Window into the Damasian Mind

The Damasian Mind, as described by Antonio Damasio, emerges from the integration of interoception and proprioception — the feeling of being.
During childhood, this integration is pure: the child does not separate the body from the world.
She feels the Earth, the sounds, and the presence of others as part of herself.

Studies on infant brain connectivity show that maturation of the insula and anterior cingulate cortex occurs in synchrony with early affective experiences (Craig, 2021; Thompson et al., 2023).
This forms the foundation of what we call original neural spirituality — a unity between body, environment, and others that precedes culture and belief.

When this natural state of fruition is replaced by rigid doctrines, we lose the metabolic wisdom of Pachamama.
The DANA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid Natural Awareness) framework proposes a conscious return to this physiological communion — a secular religiosity of DNA, where the body’s natural intelligence regulates personal and social well-being.

Attachment, Regulation, and Care as Spirituality

Touch, care, and synchronized breathing between parents and infants generate physiological coherence — aligning heart rate, respiration, and oxytocin levels.
These interactions sculpt the attachment system and self-regulation capacity (Walker et al., 2023).
What neuroscience calls coherence, ancestral cultures call harmony with the Earth.

A child learns spirituality through care, not catechism.
The absence of this coherence fragments the sense of belonging and creates the void later filled by ideologies, dogmas, or dependence on external authority.
Thus, healthy spirituality is a product of early autonomic regulation — the harmony between biological rhythm and emotional safety.

Culture, Childhood, and Decolonial Spirituality

In Indigenous and Amerindian cultures, spirituality is learned through synchrony, not imposition.
The body is educated to feel the rhythm of wind, water, fire, and song.
These practices activate motor, auditory, and interoceptive circuits, consolidating belonging as a neurophysiological experience of collectivity.

By contrast, colonial cultures externalized spirituality:
they turned the sacred into language and hierarchy, separating humans from nature and the body from the soul.
Decolonial Neuroscience seeks to restore the body’s right to experience the sacred directly — not through guilt or fear, but through sensation and resonance.

DANA — The Secular Spirituality of Pachamama

The DANA framework recognizes spirituality as a natural function of life.
Each gene, each cell carries the potential to feel belonging and seek balance with its environment.
DANA proposes that secular states adopt this biological spirituality as an ethical basis for regulating all religions — ensuring that no ritual or belief causes harm or dissociation from the body.

Religious education would then become a science of feeling:
an education in interoception, empathy, and emotional self-regulation.
DANA represents the public policy of Pachamama — the recognition of DNA as the shared consciousness among all living beings.

Conclusion

Spirituality is not belief — it is metabolism.
It arises from the coherence between body, Earth, and community.
In the context of SfN 2025 and Decolonial Neuroscience, childhood is the territory where this coherence first forms.

When a child is seen as part of Pachamama, not as a soul detached from her, she learns to feel the world as her own body extended.
That is the essence of Human Quorum Sensing —
a universal information field shared by all living beings and cells, maintaining planetary and conscious balance.

References (post-2020)

• Craig A.D. Interoception and the Neural Basis of Self. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2021.
  
  

• Schore A.N. The Right Brain and the Origins of Early Attachment. Development and Psychopathology, 2023.
  
  

• Feldman R. The Neurobiology of Human Bonding and Social Development. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2024.
  
  

• Walker S.C. et al. Social Contact, Oxytocin, and Anti-Inflammatory Pathways in Humans. Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.
  
  

• Lutz A., Dunne J., Davidson R. Meditation, Neuroplasticity, and Well-Being. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2023.
  
  

• Thompson R.A. et al. Infant Brain Connectivity and Emotional Regulation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2023.
  
  

• Tognoli E., Kelso J.A.S. The Metastable Brain: From Neuronal Dynamics to Cooperation. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2021.