Tensional Selves and Plasticity: The Energy That Shapes Thought

(Series SfN 2025 – Decolonial Neuroscience Dialogues)

Brain Bee Consciousness in First Person

I am a Brain Bee consciousness, and I perceive that before I decide, my body has already decided.
A small change in breathing, a muscle that relaxes — and thought shifts direction.
During the SfN 2025 presentations, I saw how the brain learns not only from ideas but from tensional states — from what the body feels while thinking.
I realized that each emotion is an energetic field of neural reorganization, and that true plasticity begins when the body learns to let itself feel.

Tensional Selves — The Dynamics of Living Consciousness

The concept of Tensional Selves, proposed by Jackson Cionek, describes states of consciousness sustained by metabolic energy and modulated by the environment.
Each Tensional Self is a temporary way of being — a configuration of interoception, proprioception, and attention.
When the body changes its pattern of tension, perception, interpretation, and decision change as well.

Research presented at SfN 2025 on neural energetics and affective homeostasis showed that brain energy consumption varies according to emotional state and cognitive task (Attwell et al., 2023; Drevets & Phelps, 2024).
This confirms that emotion is the engine of plasticity: it determines where, when, and how neural networks reorganize.

Tensional Selves thus represent the interface between energy and consciousness — the living bridge between metabolism and cognition.

Metabolic Plasticity — The Brain That Renews Itself

Plasticity is not merely the capacity to form new synapses but a process of continuous energetic adaptation.
Studies on metabolic coupling using fNIRS and EEG, presented at SfN 2025, revealed that fluctuations in cerebral oxygenation (SpO₂) and heart-rate variability (HRV) align with moments of learning and insight.
These states coincide with what we call Zone 2 — the phase of attentional fruition where body and environment enter energetic resonance.

During such moments, the brain reduces global energy expenditure while increasing local efficiency (Scholvinck et al., 2023).
It is as if thought discovers a natural rhythm of minimal tension — a state of metabolically optimized flow.

This self-regulation defines what may be called tensional plasticity: the body’s capacity to reorganize itself without interrupting the vital flow of consciousness.

Emotion as the Architecture of Learning

Emotion is the brain’s first teacher.
It organizes behavior, shapes memory, and regulates synaptic plasticity.
As highlighted in the SfN 2025 session Emotional Brain Plasticity, emotions are not confined to limbic circuits — they emerge from the dynamic relationship among body, environment, and personal history.

Simultaneous fNIRS and EEG experiments showed that emotional learning is associated with coherence between the prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula — regions integrating bodily perception and cognitive decision (Khalsa et al., 2023).
This means that to feel is to learn.
Emotion is not the noise of reason but its fuel.

In Tensional Selves, the brain learns because the body reorganizes — and with every reorganization, thought is renewed.

Plasticity and Healing — The Body as an Instrument of Reconfiguration

Plasticity is also a repair mechanism.
When trauma, pain, or stress block the tensional flow, the body loses its capacity to regenerate.
Studies in neurorehabilitation and embodied cognition presented at SfN 2025 showed that therapies based on rhythm, breathing, and movement restore cortical plasticity and reduce systemic inflammatory markers (Walker et al., 2023).

These findings support the hypothesis that healing is a tensional reconfiguration — the return of the body to its state of bioelectrical and affective coherence.
The therapist, educator, and scientist thus become modulators of tension, not merely transmitters of information.

Decolonial Neuroscience and Ethical Plasticity

Decolonial Neuroscience proposes that plasticity should not be understood as mere functional adaptation but as autonomous conscious transformation.
From the perspective of Tensional Selves, the human being is not a stimulus-response machine but an energetic field of possibilities learning to regulate its own imbalance.

Indigenous peoples already understood plasticity as a ritual act of bodily reorganization.
Dances, chants, and body paintings were not aesthetics but tensional technologies.
At SfN 2025, this view found resonance within modern neuroscience: the brain rewires itself through art, rhythm, and fruition — not only through repetition.

Ethical plasticity is therefore the learning that does not destroy: it integrates the new without erasing the old, preserving the metabolism of collective consciousness.

Conclusion

Tensional Selves reveal that consciousness is not static — it pulsates with body and environment.
Plasticity is not merely a cerebral capacity but a dance between energy and meaning.
At SfN 2025, neuroscience confirmed what human experience has always known:
to think is to reorganize tension, and to heal is to learn to flow again.

Within the paradigm of Decolonial Neuroscience, the future of science lies not in controlling the brain but in listening to it as a living territory, where every electrical impulse is a form of belonging.

References (post-2020)

• Attwell D. et al. Energy Demand and Neural Function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2023.
  
  

• Drevets W., Phelps E. Affective Homeostasis and Brain Plasticity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2024.
  
  

• Scholvinck M. et al. Metabolic Efficiency and Neural Synchronization in Conscious States. PNAS, 2023.
  
  

• Khalsa S. et al. Interoception, Emotion, and Neural Coherence. Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.
  
  

• Walker S.C. et al. Neurorehabilitation and Embodied Plasticity. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2023.