Perception Is Not a Channel: It’s a State

A Brain Bee provocation grounded in Latin American ancestral knowledge

I walk into the experiment room.

The light is white. The silence is heavy. There’s a chair and a screen. The researcher greets me with a quick smile and says:

“Stay still.”
“Breathe normally.”
“Pay attention.”

On the experiment sheet, this looks like mere “instructions.”
In my body, it’s already a stimulus.

My chest tightens a little. My breathing gets shorter. My belly holds. I didn’t even notice—my body did.

Before the first image appears, my state has already changed.

What Indigenous Peoples Have Always Known

Many Indigenous peoples of the Americas have long lived a simple truth:

books don’t teach by themselves.

They only point. The body learns—by living.

Knowledge doesn’t enter as “information.” It enters as experience: territory, movement, rhythm, relationship, community. If it doesn’t become lived experience, it doesn’t become body. And if it doesn’t become body, it becomes only narrative.

In our avatar language: if the body doesn’t live it, Tekoha doesn’t incorporate it.

Tekoha: Extended Interoception + Symbols

Tekoha is not only “what I feel inside” (heartbeat, breathing, tension).
Tekoha is extended interoception: the place where beliefs, faith, culture, and customs also live—as learned bodily states.

Now comes the key point: humans are constantly re-signifying qualia.

Qualia = “how something appears to me” (the inner taste of the world).
A symbol (a word, an order, a gesture) does not have a fixed meaning.
It changes with the state.

So when the researcher says “pay attention,” my body might hear:

“you’re being evaluated”
“don’t mess up”
“do it right”

Or, on another day, my body might hear only: “ok.”

The word is the same.
The qualia is different.

This means something powerful for neuroscience:
the researcher’s instruction is not just cognitive guidance. It is an interoceptive trigger.

APUS: The Body Is Territory

Even when I’m “still,” I’m not neutral.

My body feels the floor, the chair, my posture, the distance to the screen, the cold air in the room. This is APUS: body-as-territory, extended proprioception.

If I’m curled in, my perception becomes narrower.
If I’m supported and loose, it opens.

So when the stimulus appears (an image, a word, a sound), it doesn’t enter an isolated brain. It enters a situated body.

Perception is not “vision + hearing + touch” as separate channels.
Perception is a bodily state integrating everything at once.

Jiwasa: When Learning Happens With Others

If other people are present, it changes even more.

The body senses others. Adjusts rhythm. Synchronizes. This is Jiwasa: synchrony among bodies in the same biome and shared task.

In a classroom, in ritual, in training, in a collective experiment,
a portion of perception is not “inside me.” It is between us.

“But in the lab I control the stimulus”

Here is the Brain Bee provocation:

Even when the stimulus is repeated identically, the system is not identical.

Modern science shows this at multiple levels. One example fits perfectly with our idea:

neurons show large variability even for identical stimuli, depending on internal brain states and behavior.
And reviews/discussions show that neuronal responses vary from trial to trial, and part of that variability is linked to “state” (arousal, movement, context), not only to “noise.”

Translated into our text:

If a neuron can “sometimes fire, sometimes not” for the same stimulus because of the network’s internal state,
imagine a human participant, with Tekoha loaded with culture, memory, body, and belonging.

The Smell of Lemon and the Ancestral Lesson

Now I imagine the smell of lemon.

In the lab, the stimulus is controlled. But if I’m tense, lemon can feel harsh. If I’m relaxed, it can feel fresh.

And if I’m in a deeper state (sleep, dream, strong memory), lemon can become more intense than in the lab—because qualia depends not only on the stimulus, but on the state.

This idea connects directly with recent work on how interoceptive rhythms (heart, breathing, etc.) shape perceptual processing.
And also with approaches that place movement at the center of “shaping the self” and regulating emotion and cognition.

“Books Don’t Teach” and Narrative Rigidity

When the body has no space and movement to signal and self-regulate, something dangerous happens:

people become prisoners of narratives
they harden into certainty
they confuse repeated speech with bodily truth

That’s where rigidities arise—not only cognitive, but bodily. A body without breath, without territory, without movement loses the ability to reorganize perception itself.

Latin American ancestral knowledge insists:

you must live in order to learn. You need body, ground, relationship, care, rhythm.

And recent academic literature has reinforced this bridge: knowledge emerges from the body and relationships, not only from the head—for example, discussions of sentipensar in Nasa Indigenous practices, where knowledge emerges from being-in-relation, from the body, from affect, and from land-based practices.

Why This Matters for Latin America

We carry low self-esteem because for a long time we were told that “real” knowledge comes from outside—and that ours is folklore.

But when contemporary science rediscovers that:

perception is state
learning is embodied
symbols change with Tekoha
even the neuron varies with state

…it is arriving, by another path, close to something many Indigenous peoples have lived for centuries:

without the body, there is no knowledge.

Final Brain Bee Provocation

So if you are going to do science (or learn science), the question changes.

It’s not only “what stimulus was presented?”

It is:

in what body?
in what breathing?
in what territory (APUS)?
with what Tekoha (history, beliefs, culture)?
with what Jiwasa (with whom, in what relationship)?

Because in the end:

Perception is not a channel.
Perception is a state.

Post-2021 References - Commented:

1. Berntson, G. G., & Khalsa, S. S. (2021).
Neural circuits of interoception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(1), 17–32.
Comment: Establishes interoception as a central backbone of perception and consciousness; supports Tekoha as extended interoception shaping qualia.

2. Allen, M., Tsakiris, M., & colleagues. (2022).
Interoceptive inference and the embodied self. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 23, 145–158.
Comment: Shows the self and conscious experience emerge from body-based inference; explains why symbols/words change meaning with state.

3. Stringer, C., Pachitariu, M., et al. (2021).
Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional brainwide activity. Science, 364(6437).
Comment: Demonstrates that spontaneous bodily/brain activity strongly modulates stimulus responses; “noise” is often internal state.

4. Fuchs, T. (2023).
The embodied and enactive mind. Philosophical Psychology, 36(3), 369–392.
Comment: Argues perception arises from dynamic brain–body–environment coupling; aligns with APUS (body as territory).

5. Safaai, H., von Heimendahl, M., & Diamond, M. E. (2022).
Variability in neural responses reflects internal state, not noise. Neuron, 110(4), 650–664.
Comment: Direct evidence that identical stimuli can yield different neuronal outputs depending on internal state—core support for “state > channel.”

6. McCormick, D. A., McGinley, M. J., & Salkoff, D. B. (2021).
Brain state dependent processing. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 44, 1–25.
Comment: Comprehensive review of how global brain states (arousal/attention) reshape sensory processing; reinforces the experimental implication.

7. Seth, A. K., & Friston, K. J. (2021).
Active interoceptive inference and the embodied self. (Journal review / perspective format).
Comment: Links predictive processing to interoception; strengthens the claim that perception is a controlled inference shaped by bodily states (Tekoha).

8. Indigenous Latin American epistemologies in “sentipensar” (recently discussed post-2021 in decolonial scholarship; Nasa traditions).
Comment (LatAm – ancestral knowledge): Sentipensar (“feel-think with the Earth”) frames knowledge as embodied, relational, and territorial—supporting the claim “books don’t teach alone” and connecting directly to Tekoha (internal territory), APUS (body-territory), and Jiwasa (between-bodies synchrony).