Biobehavioral Synchrony and Allostasis: When One Body Helps Another Body Build a World
Biobehavioral Synchrony and Allostasis: When One Body Helps Another Body Build a World
BrainLatam2026 Comments in Decolonial Neuroscience
Victor N. Almeida’s essay “An essay on biobehavioural synchrony and allostatic regulation” presents a very valuable scientific intuition: the infant brain develops inside a living network of regulation with other bodies.
The author articulates three central ideas.
First, biobehavioral synchrony: parents and infants synchronize voice, gesture, gaze, touch, cardiac rhythms, neuroendocrine signals, and bodily patterns.
Second, allostasis: the organism regulates itself by anticipating needs and receiving influence from the environment, including other organisms.
Third, brain development: the infant, with high plasticity and sensory sensitivity, receives rhythms, predictability, and affective signals from caregivers that help build internal models of world, emotion, language, and safety.
The strength of the essay lies in connecting these three dimensions. Almeida calls the regulation of one organism by another “biobehavioral allostasis.” This formulation allows us to think of the infant as a living system in formation, regulated by bodily, emotional, and relational signals that arrive through the other.
The infant begins in Jiwasa
From the BrainLatam2026 lens, we can say:
before there is an autonomous self, there is a body being regulated with other bodies.
This point is extremely important.
The infant is born in relation.
Born in rhythm.
Born in touch.
Born in voice.
Born in warmth.
Born in smell.
Born in shared breathing.
Born in Jiwasa.
Jiwasa is the “we” perceiving together. It is the collective intelligence that emerges when two or more bodies regulate themselves around the same task of life. In the infant’s case, the task is fundamental: staying alive, building safety, learning rhythms, forming language, feeling belonging, and organizing the Body-Territory.
Almeida’s essay helps show that Jiwasa is not only a social metaphor. It can be investigated as a biological, neurophysiological, and behavioral phenomenon.
Biobehavioral allostasis: the other as regulatory environment
The author distinguishes homeostasis from allostasis. Homeostasis refers to internal self-regulation. Allostasis expands the idea: the body regulates itself by anticipating needs and receiving influence from the environment. When that environment is another human body, we have biobehavioral regulation.
In infant development, this changes everything.
The infant is still forming its own patterns of self-regulation. The caregiver functions as a kind of living regulatory environment. The adult offers rhythm, predictability, containment, voice, touch, gaze, and response.
These signals help the infant nervous system build more stable patterns.
Over time, what came from outside can become internal regulation.
What was Jiwasa gradually becomes Tensional Self.
What was shared rhythm becomes bodily memory.
What was holding becomes safety.
What was voice becomes language.
What was presence becomes model of the world.
This is one of the essay’s major contributions.
Rhythm, brain, and communication between bodies
The text also proposes that neural communication is rhythmic. Neural assemblies communicate through coherence, synchronization, and oscillatory patterns. The author extends this logic to relationships between bodies: speech, sucking, touch, listening, and movement also have rhythms that may synchronize nervous systems.
This hypothesis is highly fertile.
It brings together:
communication through neural coherence;
bodily synchrony;
infant development;
parental bonding;
language;
emotion;
transgenerational culture.
In Decolonial Neuroscience, this connects directly with APUS and Tekoha.
Tekoha is the world entering the body: sound, warmth, touch, hunger, fear, welcome, smell, pain, affection.
APUS is the body positioning itself in the world: posture, movement, approach, withdrawal, presence, territory, direction.
In the infant, APUS and Tekoha are in continuous construction. The world enters through the caregiver, and the infant’s body responds with crying, gaze, sucking, movement, relaxation, tension, or search for contact.
This cycle is allostatic, biobehavioral, and deeply territorial.
The caregiver as first territory
Here, an important decolonial reading appears.
In many colonial psychologies, the infant is often described as an individual who later enters society.
Decolonial Neuroscience proposes another path:
the infant is already born as Body-Territory in relation.
The infant’s first territory is the caring body.
The lap is territory.
The breast is territory.
The voice is territory.
The smell is territory.
The rhythm of the house is territory.
The predictability or unpredictability of the environment is territory.
The infant does not merely receive stimuli. The infant receives world.
And that world enters the body as regulation, threat, safety, tension, or belonging.
For this reason, biobehavioral allostasis can be read as a neuroscientific basis for the concept of Body-Territory.
Health, suffering, and developmental trajectories
The essay also discusses how disruptions in biobehavioral synchrony may participate in trajectories of psychological suffering.
The example chosen is schizophrenia. The author articulates early stress, the HPA axis, cortisol, development of limbic circuits, the GABA system, amygdala, hippocampus, dopamine, and neurodevelopmental vulnerability models.
This part should be read carefully.
The essay proposes a theoretical hypothesis, not a single explanation.
Schizophrenia involves multiple dimensions: genetics, epigenetics, environment, development, stress, neural circuits, social context, and life history.
The author’s contribution is to show that disruption of early biobehavioral regulation may be one pathway that increases vulnerability.
In BrainLatam2026 language:
when early Jiwasa is marked by extreme disorganization, abandonment, threat, or unpredictability, some Tensional Selves may form under deep tension.
The body learns the world as threat.
The allostatic system organizes itself to survive.
Perception may become more defensive, fragmented, or hyperalert.
This reading avoids blaming families and opens a path for public policies of care, parental protection, SUS, early childhood, mental health, and territorial support.
BrainLatam2026 Decolonial Comment
The strongest point of the essay is that it moves the brain out of isolation.
The brain stops being seen as a closed organ inside the skull.
It becomes understood as part of a body-body-world system.
This is a fundamental shift.
Decolonial Neuroscience proposes exactly this: begin with the living whole and then make the necessary cuts.
DNA.
Body.
Interoception.
Proprioception.
Territory.
Caregiver.
Clan.
Jiwasa.
State.
Then we cut into brain, HPA axis, cortisol, GABA, dopamine, oscillation, language, emotion, and behavior.
The cut remains necessary.
It allows measurement.
It allows testing.
It allows evidence-based science.
But the cut serves the living whole.
The infant is not only a nervous system.
The infant is Body-Territory in formation.
The caregiver is not only stimulus.
The caregiver is regulatory environment.
The family is not only context.
It is the first clan of biobehavioral allostasis.
The State is not only a distant institution.
It is an infrastructure of protection so that caregiving bodies can also regulate better.
DREX Citizen, State, and early childhood
Here we can build a bridge with Democratic Sovereignty 5.0.
If the infant depends on the regulation of other bodies, caregivers also depend on material conditions to regulate well.
Sleep.
Food.
Housing.
Safety.
Time.
Mental health.
Income.
Support networks.
SUS.
Daycare.
School.
Transportation.
Protection against violence.
Biobehavioral allostasis does not happen in a vacuum.
It happens inside a social Body-Territory.
For this reason, early childhood public policies are also neurodevelopmental policies.
Within the BrainLatam2026 proposal, DREX Citizen appears as a civic technology of belonging: a way to guarantee minimum energy so that bodies can exist, care, regulate, and participate in collective life.
A State that protects caregivers protects infants.
A State that protects infants protects the future of the Body-Territory.
Scientific questions for young researchers
This essay opens excellent questions for studies using EEG, fNIRS/NIRS, hyperscanning, ECG, respiration, EMG, GSR, and autonomic measures.
How does caregiver-infant synchrony appear in EEG hyperscanning during speech, touch, singing, or play?
How can fNIRS measure prefrontal coupling between caregiver and child in conditions of safety, mild stress, and recovery?
How do HRV/RMSSD, respiration, and GSR show the transition from external regulation to self-regulation?
How do different Latin American cultures organize rhythms of care, touch, singing, holding, and presence?
How can APUS and Tekoha be operationalized through measures of posture, movement, interoception, respiration, and prefrontal activity?
How does family Jiwasa change in contexts of poverty, violence, territorial safety, or State support?
How can simple interventions — singing, affectionate touch, responsive presence, parental guidance — reorganize biobehavioral synchrony?
These questions are important for BrainLatam because they connect theory, technology, and Latin American reality.
They also show that EEG, NIRS/fNIRS, hyperscanning, and biosensors can help transform Decolonial Neuroscience concepts into experimental designs.
Conclusion
Victor N. Almeida’s essay is valuable because it places regulation between bodies at the center of neurodevelopment.
It helps us think that the infant begins life in shared allostasis.
Begins in rhythm.
Begins in touch.
Begins in voice.
Begins in Jiwasa.
From there, the Body-Territory builds its Tensional Selves, internal models, forms of safety, language, emotion, and perception of the world.
Decolonial Neuroscience expands this proposal by reminding us that no brain develops outside territory.
Every brain forms within bodies, clans, rhythms, smells, public policies, inequalities, cultures, technologies, and States.
For this reason, studying biobehavioral synchrony is also studying the sovereignty of life.
It is studying how one body helps another body build a world.
References
Almeida, V. N. An essay on biobehavioural synchrony and allostatic regulation. User-uploaded essay.
Atzil, S.; Gendron, M. Bio-behavioral synchrony promotes the development of conceptualized emotions. Current Opinion in Psychology, 2017.
Feldman, R. Parent–infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2007.
Sterling, P. Allostasis: a model of predictive regulation. Physiology & Behavior, 2012.
Roche, E. C. et al. Caregiver-child neural synchrony: Magic, mirage, or mechanism? 2024. Review on caregiver-child neural synchrony as a possible mechanism of healthy development.
Wass, S. V. Understanding allostasis: Early-life self-regulation... 2024. Recent discussion on allostasis and self-regulation in early childhood.
Diaz-Rojas, F.; Matsunaga, M.; Myowa, M. Connected brains, connected bodies: A comprehensive model of parent-infant allostatic co-regulation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2025.
Carozza, S.; Leong, V. The role of affectionate caregiver touch in early neurodevelopment and parent-infant interactional synchrony. 2021.
Ulmer-Yaniv, A. et al. Synchronous caregiving from birth to adulthood tunes humans’ social brain. PNAS, 2021.
Vitali, H. et al. Sensorimotor Oscillations in Human Infants during an Innate Rhythmic Movement. Brain Sciences, 2024. Reference cited in the essay on sensorimotor oscillations in infants during innate rhythmic movement.
