The Drug of Believing - When a Narrative Offers an Emotional Cocktail

Fear, reward, recognition, and belonging: who benefits from the value generated by our attention?

Have You Ever Felt the Pleasure of Being Right?

Imagine posting an opinion and receiving hundreds of messages agreeing with you.

Someone writes: “Finally, someone who understands!”

You feel satisfaction, recognition, perhaps a sense of belonging.

Now imagine encountering information that contradicts what you posted.

What happens in your body?

Curiosity? Discomfort? An immediate urge to defend your position?

Perhaps you are also protecting the emotions associated with that narrative.

I want to investigate this experience with you.

What if believing offered an emotional cocktail so comforting that we stopped perceiving other possibilities?

The problem is not that we feel. It is understanding how our emotions participate in what we come to regard as true.

Feeling Testifies to Consciousness, Not to Truth

Imagine waking up frightened after a dream.

Your heart races. Your breathing changes. Fear intensely participates in your experience.

Yet the event you dreamed about may never have happened outside that experience.

In BrainLatam's philosophical interpretation, feeling testifies to our conscious experience of Being.

But the intensity of that experience does not prove the interpretation we construct about its origin.

Feeling testifies to consciousness, but not to the truth of the narrative accompanying the feeling.

This distinction allows us to acknowledge our emotions while continuing to investigate events.

Our Body-Territory feels, learns, interprets, and transforms its possibilities.

The Emotional Cocktail Is Not a Chemical Drug

When we anticipate a reward, our organism engages in processes involving motivation and learning.

Dopamine plays important roles in reward prediction error signaling, learning, and motivation.

It is not simply a pleasure chemical.

Fear involves other neural, autonomic, and hormonal processes. Social recognition adds expectations and emotional relationships.

We call this combination an emotional cocktail as a metaphor.

Believing is not equivalent to chemical dependence. Faith can sustain care, solidarity, and creativity.

The question concerns the possibility of a narrative concentrating our expectations, emotions, and decisions.

How can we recognize the comfort of believing while remaining open to learning?

When Fear Makes Us Think Fast

Imagine receiving frightening news.

Before fully understanding it, you already feel the need to act.

Fear can encourage rapid responses to perceived threats.

Repetition can also facilitate automatic responses, making certain paths of interpretation familiar.

These are different processes. Neither necessarily eliminates our ability to reflect.

The distinction popularized in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow helps us recognize tendencies toward automatic judgments and deliberate evaluations.

Now imagine a sequence of news stories that continuously provoke fear or outrage.

You respond quickly to one, then another.

At what point do we find the opportunity to investigate the meaning and relevance of what we are feeling?

Repetition Can Produce Conformity

Imagine hearing the same statement every day.

It appears in videos, conversations, and messages from your friends.

Over time, it becomes familiar.

Psychology investigates the illusory truth effect: certain repeated statements may seem more truthful because they have become familiar.

Collective recognition adds another experience.

Perhaps agreeing helps maintain your place within the group.

Perhaps disagreeing brings the fear of losing your sense of belonging.

We can learn through repetition and build valuable relationships through shared experiences.

But familiarity does not replace verification, just as collective agreement does not prove a claim.

The Latin American Experiment on Confirmation

In 2024, Argentine researcher Natalia Aruguete and her colleagues published an experiment involving participants from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia.

The researchers presented factual corrections using different forms of framing.

One formulation confirmed true information. Another refuted equivalent false information.

The factual content was similar, but the responses differed.

Affirmative framing generated greater engagement and more positive self-reported emotions.

This result shows how the way information is presented can change our willingness to engage with it.

The same reality can produce different emotional experiences depending on the narrative through which it is presented.

This invites us to distinguish evidence, interpretation, and feeling.

The Screen Offers the Next Stimulus

Now return to your phone.

One video provokes fear. Another generates outrage. The next offers relief.

You keep scrolling.

The platform may use interaction signals to recommend new content.

Your attention has economic value.

A camera selected images, someone edited words, and digital systems organized their presentation.

Our perception is already a selection of reality.

On the screen, we perceive a selection within a selection.

What receives prominence may gain attentional priority without necessarily having greater relevance to our existence.

Not everything that captures our attention deserves to occupy the center of our lives.

Whose Problems Are We Living Through?

I want to ask you something different.

How much of the information that stirred your emotions today relates to the water you drink, your food, your health, and the people you live with?

Perhaps you followed a dispute between billionaires, celebrities, or major corporations.

These issues may have real social consequences and deserve investigation.

But we may also receive content selected primarily for its ability to generate engagement.

Meanwhile, nearby problems remain outside our attention.

Our attention may be generating value for distant interests while important possibilities within our own Biome remain unnoticed.

What if we began investigating where our attention could create personal, social, and ecological value?

The Man of Wood Found His Reward

Our Man of Wood learned by imitating narratives.

He found friends, recognition, and security.

Each confirmation can strengthen the familiarity of his beliefs.

At BrainLatam, we investigate this stability through the metaphor of a semantic-affective local optimum.

The narrative may become a rigid part of his identity.

In our metaphor of blind faith, questioning a belief begins to feel like a threat to one's own Being.

The follower has ceased to Be.

But our character can encounter other experiences, transform interpretations, and continue to belong.

His history does not have to determine every possibility of his tomorrow.

The Man of Maize Turns Back Toward the Biome

In BrainLatam's interpretation inspired by the Popol Wuj, the Man of Clay believes he belongs to a superior order.

The Man of Wood follows narratives.

The Man of Maize recognizes his existence in food, culture, learning, and relationships.

He also receives news. He also feels fear and curiosity.

But he turns his perception toward the territory where he lives.

What is happening to the water? How are his neighbors living? What can be improved in food, health, and the environment?

The Biome participates in producing his very existence.

The Man of Maize does not ignore the world. He investigates how the world participates in his territory and where his actions can generate shared value.

In the Atlantic Forest, Perception Found Movement

I entered the Atlantic Forest barefoot, wearing only shorts.

I encountered roots, branches, and tangled vegetation.

I protected my skin while trying to preserve every branch.

At certain moments, I had to crawl.

My hands found support. My feet recognized textures.

Every movement revealed another possibility.

There, I experienced a principle:

Perceive what is possible.

The territory did not offer the same passage every time.

My Body-Territory learned with every movement.

Perhaps we can discover a similar freedom when facing digital narratives: expanding our experiences and finding other directions for our attention.

Jiwasa: The Pleasure of Building Together

In Futuro ancestral, Ailton Krenak invites us to perceive the future through the continuity of the relationships that sustain life.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui investigates knowledge and collective practices produced through territorial experiences.

At BrainLatam, we call our investigation into shared agency Jiwasa.

The Man of Maize belongs and continues learning.

Within our proposal, the Body-Territory constitutes the smallest and indivisible unit of the State.

Personalissima AI, Citizen Drex, and Biome Income are part of our proposals to expand autonomy, participation, and collective responsibility.

Production of Excess invites us to investigate the social and environmental value of what we produce.

Attention can become participation in collective transformation.

Transcending Our Being: Where Will Our Attention Go Next?

Return to that opinion you posted.

You received recognition and felt satisfaction.

Now you encounter knowledge that expands your interpretation.

You can welcome it.

Let it come → Let it stay → Let it Be → You may disobey → Let it go.

In BrainLatam's extended interpretation of Yãy hã mĩy, imitation can also open possibilities for transcending one's own Being.

We are heirs to the past, participants in the present, and jointly responsible for the futures we make possible for the next Body-Territories.

Perhaps there is something as valuable as the pleasure of being right:

The pleasure of discovering that we can learn, transform our perception, and continue to belong.

Before watching the next video, try asking:

What am I learning, what possibilities does this information offer, and for whom is my attention creating value?

Commented Latin American References — Post-2021

Natalia Aruguete, Flavia Batista, Ernesto Calvo, Matias Guizzo-Altube, Carlos Scartascini, and Tiago Ventura (2024). Framing fact-checks as a “confirmation” increases engagement with corrections of misinformation: a four-country study. Scientific Reports, 14, 3201.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-53337-0

An experimental study involving participants from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. It shows how presenting information through confirmation or refutation can change engagement and emotional reactions, even when the factual content is equivalent. This is the main empirical reference for the emotional rewards associated with confirmation.

Cetic.br / NIC.br / CGI.br (2025). TIC Kids Online Brazil 2025.
https://www.cgi.br/noticia/releases/tic-kids-online-brasil-65-das-criancas-e-dos-adolescentes-usam-ia-generativa-para-estudar-criar-conteudo-e-lidar-com-emocoes/

This Brazilian survey reveals the extensive presence of digital devices and AI tools in the everyday lives of children and adolescents. Among internet users aged 9–17, 65% had used generative AI, including for studying, creating content, or discussing emotions. It contributes to understanding the relationship between attention, learning, and technological mediation.

Cetic.br / NIC.br / CGI.br (2024). TIC Kids Online Brazil 2024.
https://cgi.br/noticia/releases/tic-kids-online-investiga-pela-primeira-vez-frequencia-do-uso-de-plataformas-digitais-por-criancas-e-adolescentes/

Investigates how frequently Brazilian children and adolescents access digital platforms. It provides context for repeated encounters with messaging environments, videos, and social networks, without assuming that frequent use necessarily produces dependence.

Ailton Krenak (2022). Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras.
https://www.companhiadasletras.com.br/9786559211548-futuro-ancestral/p

The Brazilian Indigenous thinker connects existence, rivers, ancestry, and the continuity of life. His work offers a counterpoint to having our attention captured by distant events, inviting us to perceive the concrete relationships that constitute our territories.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, in dialogue with Paola Lopes Zamariola, Ana Carolina Abreu, Dodi Leal, and José Miguel Neira (2024). Campo Abierto: conversas sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores con Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Rebento.
https://periodicos.ia.unesp.br/index.php/rebento/pt_BR/article/view/803

This dialogue with the Bolivian sociologist explores affectivity, collective practices, territoriality, and knowledge production. It enriches the proposal that attention and learning can generate transformations rooted in shared life.

BrainLatam (2026). Jiwasa — Belonging Without Remaining in the Same Position.
https://www.brainlatam.com/blog/jiwasa-pertencer-sem-permanecer-na-mesma-posicao-8663

Develops the proposal of shared agency and the possibility of transformation without abandoning belonging. It provides philosophical continuity to the reflection on social reinforcement, conformity, and autonomy.

BrainLatam (2025). Yãy hã mĩy — Imitating Being to Transcend One's Own Being.
https://www.brainlatam.com/blog/yay-ha-m-y-imitar-se-ser-para-transcender-se-ser-6714

Presents an extended philosophical interpretation of imitation, learning, and the transformation of Being, in dialogue with Tikmũ'ũn/Maxakali knowledge.

Correct the Man of Clay and Maize passageClarify the central emotional-cocktail metaphor

BRAINLATAM · W43/2026 · THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM