When the Environment Learns the State of the Group

Neuroadaptive VR, real-time fear, and the next step: tasks that respond to collective physiology

There is an important shift we begin to feel when we take the neuroscience of collectives seriously: the environment does not have to remain a passive stage where bodies merely act. It can begin to perceive, respond, modulate, and return something to the dynamics of the relation itself. When that happens, an experiment stops being only a task applied to individuals and starts becoming a living field in which brain, body, and context reorganize together.

That is why the work of Wriessnegger and colleagues matters so much here. In their VRSpi study, they present a proof-of-concept neuroadaptive virtual-reality system for spider phobia that uses EEG and heart rate in real time to adjust the intensity of the fear stimulus. The key move is simple and powerful: the virtual environment is no longer fixed; it becomes responsive to the participant’s neurophysiological state. (Frontiers)

This idea is too important to remain confined to the therapeutic setting. Read through a BrainLatam2026 lens, it opens a broader question: what if the environment adapted not only to the state of one participant, but to the state of a dyad, a small group, a still-forming we? At that point, virtual reality, or any responsive environment, stops being only an exposure technology and begins to become a technology for investigating the bond itself. This is our theoretical extension from the VRSpi principle, not a direct conclusion of the paper. (Frontiers)

This is where the bridge to I-mode and We-mode becomes especially fertile. In the frame we are building here, the temporal structure of the task can remain identical across conditions while the organization of action changes. One condition sustains shared success; the other preserves interdependence but individualizes the logic of reward. That means the question is no longer only whether people coordinate, but what kind of togetherness is being organized. Once we think that way, the environment itself can become part of the diagnosis: is the dyad drifting into competitive vigilance, or is it stabilizing a genuinely shared mode of regulation?

That editorial turn becomes even stronger once we add a scientifically careful version of another intuition: organisms do not meet as abstract decision-makers; they meet as living bodies carrying biological histories, perceptual biases, and relational sensitivities. Here it is more rigorous to say not that “DNAs communicate directly,” but that organisms with distinct genomes enter mutual regulation through sensory, autonomic, behavioral, hormonal, and environmental cues, while genes and environment together shape the sensitivity and plasticity of those responses. Recent work on behavior makes exactly that point, stressing that genes and environment are deeply intertwined and that epigenetics is one of the mechanisms linking them. (ScienceDirect)

From that angle, fear can be treated as a relational modulator between organisms, both within and across species. The applied “ecology of fear” literature shows that perceived risk changes distance, vigilance, movement, and habitat use, while recent work on social fear learning argues that social signals from others can function as powerful triggers that reorganize adaptive responses in the observer. In BrainLatam language, fear is not only an individual emotion; it is also an ecological regulator of how bodies approach, avoid, monitor, and inhabit one another. (Københavns Universitets Forskningsportal)

That makes the whole question stronger. If an environment can learn the state of the body, then we have to ask: what exactly is the environment detecting and modulating? Only individual performance? Or also states of threat, trust, hesitation, openness, and contraction that reorganize the very possibility of a “we”? Once we ask that, the environment stops being just a piece of technology and becomes part of the relational ecology of the experiment. (Frontiers)

That is why this blog proposes a simple but demanding image: many experiments have treated the environment as a stage. The next step may be to make it a third active element in the relation. Not only subject, not only partner, not only machine, but an adaptive field capable of learning something about collective state and modulating challenge accordingly. In that setting, a “we” is no longer only an abstract goal. It becomes something that can be strained, tested, and perhaps cultivated in real time.

The VRSpi paper helps legitimize that move because it shows, in practice, that interactive environments can already be adjusted on the basis of online neurophysiological signals. Its focus is arachnophobia, and the system was designed as a step toward more individualized therapy. But for us, the deeper principle is what matters: the environment can learn something about the body and answer back. If that already works at the individual level, we gain a basis for imagining future paradigms in which it also responds to emergent forms of shared regulation. (Frontiers)

Through the BrainLatam2026 lens, this matters because consciousness is not treated here as detached cognition. If the Damasian Mind reminds us that mind is a living body in situation, then a responsive environment is not merely “delivering stimuli”; it is entering the ecology of consciousness itself. And if we take Triple-Aspect Monism seriously, then the physiological, the experiential, and the informational-social cannot be cleanly separated. An environment that responds in real time to bodily state is already participating in the architecture of experience. That is our theoretical reading built from the neuroadaptive logic of VRSpi. (Frontiers)

This is where Jiwasa becomes especially strong. Here Jiwasa is not simply a name for an already formed collective. It becomes an experimental question: under what conditions does an environment help us move from instrumental coordination toward genuinely shared regulation? In other words, when does the context stop pushing two people to compete around a threshold and begin sustaining a field in which success truly depends on a mutually felt commitment?

From there, the I-mode / We-mode paradigm gains a new layer. The temporal structure can remain identical across conditions, but we can begin to imagine dynamic thresholds modulated not only by objective performance, such as temporal difference between responses, but also by physiological markers of the dyad’s state. A responsive environment could increase or decrease the task demand depending on whether the pair is entering competitive rigidity, cooperative stabilization, or oscillation between the two. What today appears as an “experimental condition” could become a regulatory field of the we.

This hypothesis is not a conclusion of the VRSpi article; it is the step we are proposing from it. And it matters because it helps us break an older division between task and context. For a long time, experiments were built as ways of measuring the subject inside a controlled setting. But if the environment starts learning the state of the group, then it becomes part of the phenomenon itself. The collective is no longer merely inside the environment; it is partly being shaped with it.

That also helps us avoid a common mistake: thinking that environmental adaptation is always good in itself. It is not. An adaptive environment can cultivate more shared forms of regulation, but it can also reinforce capture, dependency, and automatism. That is why a decolonial neuroscience of collectives has to remain careful. It is not enough to celebrate that technology “responds to the user.” The more serious question is: responds toward what kind of being-together? That is the point where political critique meets experimental method. (Frontiers)

This is also where APUS enters naturally. An environment that learns the state of the group is not dealing only with brains. It is dealing with body-territory, orientation in space, felt proximity, and distributed presence. The environment stops being a container and becomes part of the extended proprioception of the relation. We are not only acting inside a space; we are beginning to build a space that answers back to how we act together.

In the end, this blog wants us to feel a simple but deep shift: the environment stops being scenery and becomes part of the experiment of the we. Wriessnegger and colleagues show that this is already technically thinkable at the individual level. The challenge now is different: to imagine how this logic can be extended to dyads and groups without losing rigor, without romanticizing the collective, and without confusing adaptation with shared agency. (Frontiers)

Maybe that is exactly where the neuroscience of collectives begins to change level: when we stop asking only how the body responds to the environment and start asking how the environment can begin responding to the collective body—and what kind of we emerges from that exchange. (Frontiers)

References

Wriessnegger, S. C., Kiatthaveephong, S., Leitner, M., & Kostoglou, K. (2026). VRSPi: towards a neuroadaptive VR exposure therapy system for spider phobia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 20. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2026.1717588. (Frontiers)

Jensen, P. (2025). From nature to nurture – How genes and environment interact to shape behaviour. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 285, 106582. doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2025.106582. (ScienceDirect)

Ramirez, J. I., Kuijper, D. P. J., Olofsson, J., Smit, C., Hofmeester, T. R., Siewert, M. B., Widemo, F., & Cromsigt, J. P. G. M. (2024). Applied ecology of fear: A meta-analysis on the potential of facilitating human-wildlife coexistence through nonlethal tools. Ecological Solutions and Evidence. doi:10.1002/2688-8319.12322. (Københavns Universitets Forskningsportal)

Lanzilotto, M., Dal Monte, O., Diano, M., Panormita, M., Battaglia, S., Celeghin, A., Bonini, L., & Tamietto, M. (2025). Learning to fear novel stimuli by observing others in the social affordance framework. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 169, 106006. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106006. (ScienceDirect)