When Synchrony Is Not Enough to Form a “We”

When Synchrony Is Not Enough to Form a “We”

I-mode, We-mode, and the moment the collective enters the body

There is a question we can feel in the body before we answer it with theory: when two people coordinate, is that already a “we”? Or can it still be only a fine adjustment between separate interests, each person protecting their own timing, their own gain, and their own stability?

This blog starts exactly there, because we want to move away from a neuroscience that treats the individual as if they arrived ready-made and isolated, and toward a genuinely relational neuroscience. The question is no longer only what one brain does in response to one stimulus. The question becomes: what changes when brains, bodies, goals, and perceived space begin to reorganize the quality of action together? (PubMed)

Recent work by Aial Sobeh helps open that door. In one study, more homogeneous groups tended toward more extreme positions, while higher interbrain synchrony in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was associated with a reduction in that extremism. In another, 200 participants divided into groups of four discussed moral dilemmas during fNIRS recording, and stronger interbrain synchrony in the left inferior frontal gyrus during deliberation predicted greater moral alignment afterward. For us, the key point is simple: what happens between brains during interaction is not decoration. The “between” participates in how collective judgment is formed. (PubMed)

But then the decisive question appears: is synchrony already lived collectivity? The most honest answer is no. Two brains can adjust without a genuinely embodied “we” coming into existence. There can be convergence without shared commitment. There can be coordination without shared agency. There can be coupling without belonging. (Wiley Online Library)

That is why the I-mode / We-mode paradigm we are sketching here becomes so powerful. Its elegance lies in keeping the sensorimotor task nearly constant while changing the architecture of action. After a variable delay, a visual go-signal appears, and each participant presses a key; the main dependent variable is the temporal difference between their responses. In the We-mode condition, if the response-time difference stays below a threshold, both gain a point; otherwise both lose a point. In the I-mode condition, interdependence remains, but reward is individualized: if the responses fall within the threshold, the faster participant gains a point and the slower loses one; otherwise both lose. The movement is similar, the timing is similar, the stimulus is similar, but the mode of being together changes.

That distinction matters because it breaks a common confusion: coordination is not the same thing as collectivity. We can adjust to another person out of private calculation. We can cooperate because it improves our own score. We can look harmonious from the outside while still being organized, from within, by separate reasons. That is precisely what Raimo Tuomela formalized when he distinguished I-mode from We-mode: in I-mode, joint activity is still grounded in private reasons and goals; in We-mode, action is lived as group action under a shared commitment to a common goal. (Wiley Online Library)

From a BrainLatam2026 perspective, though, the difference between I-mode and We-mode should not appear only in what participants say after the task. It should appear in the body. In how breathing organizes the gesture. In how musculature supports or hardens action. In how attention is distributed. In how the other person is perceived: as obstacle, as reference, or as part of a common tempo. We do not only want to know which rule was understood. We want to sense which body began to exist there.

Here an additional insight deepens the whole problem: before we cooperate, compete, or synchronize, we first have to situate ourselves. In any environment, we feel a space, a volume, a field of action within which we locate ourselves, acclimate, breathe, adjust posture, and build a mode of presence. That act of referencing ourselves in space is not peripheral detail. It already participates in the construction of the self in situation. Research on peripersonal space describes the near-body environment as the zone where most interactions with objects, threats, and other people take place. Recent work on bodily self-consciousness describes bodily self-awareness as emerging from the integration of multiple signals, including interoception, proprioception, and presence, that is, the perception of being located somewhere. (PMC)

In our language, that means something strong: the Tensional Self does not enter the experiment fully formed. We assemble it there, inside a perceived space. It is modulated by the respiratory cycle, by interoception, by proprioception, and by the recruitment of bodily and practical memories needed to sustain a way of being within that volume. The self, then, is not only an abstract psychological identity. It is also a bodily solution for inhabiting a space and acting inside it. That is why, when we talk about I-mode and We-mode, the question is not only “which motivational rule was given?” but also “how did the body locate, stabilize, and orient itself within the shared field of action?” (ScienceDirect)

When we reread Sobeh’s work through that lens, it becomes even richer. In the moral-alignment paper, higher synchrony in the left IFG during deliberation predicted stronger post-discussion alignment. That shows that the collective enters the formation of judgment. But our question can go one step further: perhaps the passage from instrumental adjustment to shared agency also depends on how two or more bodies manage to co-inhabit the same perceived field of action, not merely match a timing threshold. Perhaps a “we” is born not only from a shared goal, but from the way we find a common bodily ground from which to sustain that goal. (Nature)

The recent bodily self-consciousness literature supports that move. Owens and Duncan define bodily self-consciousness as bodily awareness arising from the integration of signals across multiple sensory modalities, and distinguish embodiment from presence: embodiment is the perception of owning a body; presence is the perception of being at a location. Their findings indicate overlapping but partly distinct networks for these dimensions. Brunello and colleagues, in a meta-analysis of 56 neuroimaging studies, also identify recurring neural correlates of bodily self-consciousness across manipulated body ownership and sense of agency paradigms. Together, these works support the idea that future I-mode / We-mode studies should monitor not only interbrain coupling and autonomic signals, but also networks related to space perception, presence, and self-location. (Frontiers)

That makes the methodological horizon of this blog richer. The reaction-time task remains excellent as a core paradigm because it keeps the sensorimotor structure stable while changing the motivational architecture. But future studies could add two layers. The first is the classical bodily layer: respiration, ECG with HRV/RMSSD, EMG from masseter and trapezius, perhaps GSR. The second is the spatial and presence layer: neural and behavioral markers related to self-location, orientation in perceived space, and the co-regulation of presence with another person. On the basis of recent reviews, parietal, premotor, temporoparietal, and insular regions look especially relevant for this direction. (PMC)

This broader view also prevents a dangerous simplification: confusing instruction with experience. Saying “maximize together” does not guarantee that a “we” has emerged. The internal discussion around the paradigm already recognizes that residual egocentric strategies may persist even in We-mode and that such residue should be detectable in self-reports and interbrain coupling. It also makes another key point explicit: We-mode is not defined by altruism. Donating rewards to a social institution might introduce prosocial motivation, but it does not, by itself, guarantee We-mode. What matters is whether the task induces the representation that “we are doing this together,” under shared success criteria and mutual commitment.

That is why this blog is not trying merely to describe a problem from the outside. We want the reading itself to begin functioning as a small exercise in We-mode. We are not observing a distant object. We are entering a shared question together: when does coordination stop being merely instrumental and begin to become an embodied “we”? When does the body stop monitoring the other as a threat or external constraint and begin sustaining a common field of action?

At that point, Jiwasa enters naturally. Not as a decorative word for collectivity, and not as a romantic dissolution of the individual, but as the possibility of a living, felt, embodied “we.” A “we” in which the body does not disappear; on the contrary, it finds a less predatory way to sustain the common. In that sense, the collective is neither herd nor cold contract. It is embodied coordination with space, breath, memory, and a shared goal.

That also prepares the path toward APUS and DREX Cidadão. APUS matters here because there is no self without body-territory, no agency without spatial orientation, no collectivity without a perceived volume, a shared field of action, and distributed presence. And DREX Cidadão matters because the problem of I-mode and We-mode is not only philosophical or laboratory-based; it is also institutional. Some societies place us in constant interdependence under individualized reward, diffuse vigilance, and chronic bodily tension. That is structural I-mode. Other arrangements could support common goals with minimal material security and less physiological capture. In that reading, DREX Cidadão can be thought of as a political technology of “we”: an attempt to give the common a metabolic basis so it becomes more than rhetoric. This last move is a theoretical extension we are making from the experimental and philosophical frame, not a conclusion of the cited papers.

In the end, the sentence this blog wants us to feel is simple: not every synchrony forms a “we.” The future of a decolonial neuroscience of collectives depends on distinguishing at least four things that culture constantly mixes together: temporal adjustment, instrumental cooperation, shared agency, and the spatial construction of the self in situation. Sobeh’s studies show that what happens between brains already participates in the moral and political destiny of a group. The I-mode / We-mode paradigm opens an elegant way to separate coordination from common commitment. And the spatial insight expands the question even further: a “we” is not built only between intentions, but within a space that is inhabited, breathed, and perceived together. (PubMed)

Maybe that is exactly where the neuroscience of collectives begins to change level: when we stop asking only whether two brains synchronize, and start asking in what space, with what body, and in the name of what “we” that synchrony begins to exist. (ScienceDirect)

References

Sobeh, A., Vakrat, T. M., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2025). Interbrain Synchrony Mitigates Extremism Within Echo Chambers. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1552(1), 117–128. doi:10.1111/nyas.70083. (PubMed)

Sobeh, A., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2025). The emergence of moral alignment within human groups is facilitated by interbrain synchrony. Communications Biology, 8, 464. doi:10.1038/s42003-025-07831-4. (Nature)

Tuomela, R. (2006). Joint intention, we-mode and I-mode. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 30, 35–58. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.2006.00127.x. (Wiley Online Library)

Candia-Rivera, D., Engelen, T., Babo-Rebelo, M., & Salamone, P. C. (2024). Interoception, network physiology and the emergence of bodily self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 165, 105864. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105864. (PubMed)

Basile, G. A., Tatti, E., Bertino, S., Milardi, D., Genovese, G., Bruno, A., Muscatello, M. R. A., Ciurleo, R., Cerasa, A., & Cacciola, A. (2024). Neuroanatomical correlates of peripersonal space: bridging the gap between perception, action, emotion and social cognition. Brain Structure and Function, 229, 1047–1072. doi:10.1007/s00429-024-02781-9. (PMC)

Owens, E. A. A., & Duncan, R. O. (2025). Evidence of a hierarchical representation in bodily self-consciousness: the neural correlates of embodiment and presence in virtual worlds. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 19, 1468947. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2025.1468947. (Frontiers)

Brunello, N., Diana, L., Sritharan, J., Glisic, M., Nef, T., Verma, R. K., & Zito, G. A. (2025). A systematic review and meta-analysis on the neural correlates of bodily self-consciousness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 179, 106420. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106420. (PubMed)