Don’t be “soldiers of belief” — be builders of questions
Don’t be “soldiers of belief” — be builders of questions
I’m reading recent neuroscience (EEG/ERP, motor control, BCI, neuromodulation, extreme states) as one single message — and for young researchers, it’s freeing:
What shapes my thinking, my feeling, and my actions is not a “fixed truth” (political, religious, or scientific).
It’s my body-and-social state in that moment.
And “state” is not a slogan. It’s something I can observe, measure, train, and compare — without turning it into a new dogma.
That changes everything, because dogma is the opposite: it’s when I believe there is one “right way to be” that should fit every body, every culture, every biome, every life phase. Evidence-based science keeps showing how fragile that assumption is.
What evidence is teaching me — so I can loosen dogmas
1) Attention is not a channel: it’s a posture of the whole system
I don’t “have attention” like a neutral flashlight.
I enter attention, the way I enter a posture.
When the environment changes (moving background, stimulus overload, social pressure), my brain doesn’t just “get distracted.” It switches regimes: stability changes, cost changes, and even the way I make mistakes changes.
This breaks a very common scientific dogma: that attention is an isolated “component.” It isn’t. It’s the whole body-brain system running in a mode.
Dogma that falls: “If you want it enough, you can pay attention.”
Evidence version: “Attention depends on state + context + task.”
(Embodied note for the reader)
Right now, before you keep reading: check your jaw, your breath, your shoulders.
If your breath is short, your “attention” is already biased.
2) Error is a sign of life, not proof of moral failure
When I make an error in real time (in movement, in decisions, in focus), my brain is not punishing me.
It’s trying to reduce the gap between prediction and reality.
Evidence suggests that this “correction mode” has measurable signatures (changes in brain rhythms, variability patterns, error-related signals). So instead of treating error as shame, I can treat error as data.
This also loosens political and religious dogmas, because many systems educate through fear of error.
Dogma that falls: “Error means weakness / bad character.”
Evidence version: “Error is a moment of system adjustment.”
(Embodied note)
If you want to study error, don’t start by judging it.
Start by measuring what happens in you 3 seconds before it.
3) Transitions are the sensitive point of mind and body
What destabilizes me most is not the “block” of an action — it’s the bridge between blocks:
rest → task, gesture A → gesture B, “social self” → “inner self,” theory → practice.
Modern evidence is almost shouting this: transitions require more energy, more control, more awareness.
That’s why so many things collapse “in the middle” — mid-speech, mid-training, mid-semester, mid-family conflict.
Dogma that falls: “If I can do the parts, I can do the whole.”
Evidence version: “The whole depends on bridges — bridges have a cost, and bridges can be trained.”
(Embodied note)
If your life keeps “breaking in the middle,” don’t assume you’re broken.
Measure your transitions.
4) Extreme states change cognition without asking permission
After extreme effort, deprivation, sensory overload, or contexts far from normal, the brain may become faster but less stable, or it may detect changes without integrating them at a reflective level.
This weakens a strong political-religious dogma: “People always choose with full consciousness.”
Evidence points to something more honest: decisions and beliefs can be consequences of state, not “essence.”
Dogma that falls: “The mind is sovereign and constant.”
Evidence version: “The mind is dynamic — dependent on energy, body, and context.”
(Embodied note)
Before you judge someone’s opinion, ask:
“What state are they living in every day?”
5) Culture and language are not just ideas: they are body maps
A decolonial view doesn’t have to fight science. It can use science to say something simple:
Culture regulates the body.
Food, rhythm, posture, ways of speaking, rituals, ways of looking — these train the nervous system to live inside a biome and a community.
When I pull a young person out of their symbolic and bodily territory (including language), it’s not only identity that suffers. It’s the regulation system. Then waves of tension, disorganization, and serious suffering can appear — not as personal weakness, but as a state misalignment.
Dogma that falls: “Culture is just opinion.”
Evidence version: “Culture is state-engineering.”
And yes: I can treat languages like Quechua not only as communication, but as a kind of visceral cartography — a way of organizing breath, rhythm, belonging, and presence. When someone stops speaking, sometimes it’s not “just silence.” It can be the loss of a body regulator — and the body pays the price.
The 9 avatars as “experiment glasses”
Now the practical piece: our avatars are not decoration. They are cognitive advantages for forming better questions.
Each avatar is a way of looking at the same phenomenon and generating testable hypotheses.
Brainlly (rigor)
Advantage: turning sensation into a variable.
Question: “Which marker changes first when state degrades?”Iam (real first-person)
Advantage: embodied report without romanticizing.
Question: “What do I feel in my body 10 seconds before the error?”Olmeca (decolonial/biome)
Advantage: remembering the body lives in territory and history.
Question: “Does this protocol respect the local body, or import a standard?”Yagé (state transition)
Advantage: studying transitions without moralism.
Question: “What helps the system switch regimes safely?”
(No substances here — state through breath, rhythm, music, context.)Math/Hep (model and causality)
Advantage: separating correlation from cause.
Question: “If I change X and hold the rest, what truly changes?”DANA (ethics, neutral spirituality)
Advantage: keeping well-being as a criterion, not a belief.
Question: “Does this experiment increase belonging and autonomy?”APUS (extended proprioception / body-territory)
Advantage: the body as a map of action in space.
Question: “How do support, ground, and micro-movements alter attention?”Tekoha (extended interoception / self-biome)
Advantage: inner state linked to environment and bonds.
Question: “Which internal signals change when the social context changes?”Jiwasa (collective synchrony)
Advantage: leaving the isolated-individual frame.
Question: “How does a group enter coherence — and how does it exit it?”
One simple template for strong experiments (Brain Bee)
For young researchers, I always come back to the same skeleton:
Initial State → Perturbation → Marker → Recovery
Initial State: how I arrive (sleep, breath, posture, context).
Perturbation: something simple that switches regime (transition, distraction, time pressure, moving background).
Marker: error, reaction time, variability, first-person report (and if available: HRV/EEG/pupil).
Recovery: what restores stability (pause, micro-movement, tactile feedback, transition training, rhythm).
This loosens dogma because it teaches a scientific habit:
I don’t need to defend a “truth.”
I need to observe what changes when I change the conditions.
And that is the BrainLatam2026 invitation for Brain Bee youth:
Don’t be soldiers of belief.
Be builders of questions.
Questions to test in your biome (starter pack)
What changes first in me when attention collapses: breath, jaw, posture, or pacing?
What is my most fragile transition: rest→task, screen→sleep, social→alone, theory→practice?
When I’m under pressure, do I become “faster and unstable” or “slower and frozen”?
Which recovery action brings me back fastest: long exhale, walking, silence, or rhythmic movement?
Which parts of my culture (food, rhythm, language, rituals) regulate me — and which don’t travel well to other environments?
