Jiwasa and Hyperscanner: When the Collective Becomes Data (Without Becoming Colonization)
Jiwasa and Hyperscanner: When the Collective Becomes Data (Without Becoming Colonization)
I walk into the room, but today I’m not alone.
There are three chairs in a semicircle. In the center, a table with cables arranged a little too neatly to feel like “real life.” In the corner, a cart with two kinds of sensors: an EEG cap and a set of fNIRS optodes. Above us, a camera. On the screen, a simple cooperative game: “do it together—without speaking.”
I sit down. The researcher adjusts the cap.
Before the first stimulus, I’ve already changed.
My chest tightens, my jaw sets, my breathing gets shallow. I didn’t “decide” that. It happened. And I recognize it: this is my Tensional Self—the “self” I become when the body enters task mode, evaluation mode, effort mode. It’s a state of Being that takes over before any theoretical question even arrives.
Then he shows up.
Math-Hep leans in over my shoulder as if he doesn’t want to interrupt—but he interrupts in the right way:
Math-Hep (whispering): “Write this down: the state changed before the stimulus. If you don’t measure it, you’ll call ‘noise’ what is actually the main variable.”
I almost laugh. Because this is exactly how many studies become colonial without meaning to: they treat the body and the context as statistical dirt, then export the result as if it were a universal “human law.”
The screen starts. Another person and I must synchronize clicks to move an object. No speech. Just rhythm. Just micro-adjustments: a hesitation, an acceleration, a “I think they’re going now.”
And then what I call Jiwasa happens: I feel an intelligence between us.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s a concrete bodily experience: I start predicting the other through timing—through error, through success. The collective becomes a kind of temporary organism.
Math-Hep: “If it’s between us, then your experimental design has to measure what’s between us. Otherwise you’ll explain social interaction with individual variables—and that’s a classic mistake.”
The Hyperscanner (a multi-person setup combining EEG + fNIRS + behavior) is not “technology to impress.” It’s an attempt to correct an old habit: explaining society as a sum of isolated individuals, using imported categories as the universal standard.
And here comes the delicate part: measuring is not enough. Measurement can become a new colonialism—just with prettier graphs.
What changes everything is how we measure, with whom we measure, and for what purpose.
I think about something science has been reinforcing: brain-to-brain synchrony shows up associated with cooperation, empathy, and coordination—not as magic, but as system dynamics. For example, recent work reports improved cooperation in dyadic tasks when multi-brain sensory stimulation is manipulated, and other studies point to neural alignment associated with empathy and synchrony in social interaction. (OUP Academic)
But then I remember the anti–colonial-error questions:
What exactly are we calling “cooperation”?
Whose criterion is that?
And which bodies were authorized to define what it means to “function well”?
Math-Hep: “If your label is colonial, your regression will be colonial. Statistics only amplifies the premise. First: epistemology. Then: p-values.”
I look at the sensors and notice what urgency makes us forget: EEG and fNIRS do not measure “the truth of the human.” They measure signatures of a system in a state—and state includes history, language, training, threat, belonging, and territory.
When I get tense, my coordination changes. When I relax, my timing opens up. The same social stimulus does not enter the system the same way. The “me” I am in that minute (my Tensional Self) changes what I perceive, what I anticipate, and how I respond.
And this is where the Hyperscanner becomes politically important for Latin America:
It allows us to defend—through quantifiable measures—an idea that our ancestral knowledges have carried in the body for centuries:
the social is not “inside the individual”—it is in relationships, in rhythms, in shared ground.
But… if we bring the lab to the field without changing our posture, we’re just transporting the colonizer with a bigger battery.
One example I like (because it speaks directly about method, not only results) comes from discussions of experimental fieldwork with non-WEIRD populations: life in the field does not follow the lab’s script; it demands epistemological and methodological adjustments, improvisation, bricolage—and, above all, active decolonial methodologies that remove Indigenous participants from the role of “object” and place them in protagonistic roles (including as educators and experts).
Protagonism changes engagement. And engagement changes the network. And the network changes synchrony. And synchrony changes what you think you’re “measuring.”
I return to the game. The other person and I fail twice. On the third try, we succeed beautifully—no speech, just fine-grained adjustment. I feel my body warm, my breathing drop, my Tensional Self loosen. And I notice a simple provocation:
If my state changes my perception, then my state changes my “social.”
And if the social changes my state, then the social is not just a “head topic”—it is a whole-body topic.
The way out of colonial errors in the social sciences is not to swap theory for sensors. It is to build a bridge:
Jiwasa as a central hypothesis: the collective is a real, measurable, situated dynamic.
Hyperscanner as a tool: simultaneous measurement of brain–body–behavior in interaction.
Decoloniality as a condition: co-design, local criteria, protagonism, and respect for territory (the “where” and the “with whom” are part of the data).
Math-Hep + the Tensional Self as guardians: remembering, at every step, that state is not noise—it’s the hidden variable that decides the result.
Math-Hep (final): “If you want to leave the colonial error behind, stop looking for ‘the human’ as an essence. Model the human as a system in state—in relation. And treat the ‘between us’ as first-class data.”
So I write down the last line, Brain Bee style:
The collective is not the mind’s backdrop.
The collective is part of the mind—when mind is body-in-relation.
References (2021+) with comments
A) Hyperscanning, EEG/fNIRS, and collective behavior (Hyperscanner focus)
Leiva-Cisterna, I., Barraza, P., Rodríguez, E., & Dumas, G. (2025). Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. doi:10.1093/scan/nsaf104.
Comment: Strong support—via experimental data—for the idea that interventions in the “between-two” (dyadic coupling) can amplify cooperation. Helps defend Jiwasa as an observable dynamic, not a metaphor.
Schwartz, L., Levy, J., Shapira, Y., Zagoory-Sharon, O., & Feldman, R. (2025). Empathy aligns brains in synchrony. iScience. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.112642.
Comment: Supports neural alignment linked to empathy/synchrony in interaction—useful to argue that the “social” appears as coupling signatures.
Hayati, A. F., Barde, A., Gumilar, I., Momin, A., Lee, G., Chatburn, A., & Billinghurst, M. (2025). Inter-brain synchrony in real-world and virtual reality search tasks using EEG hyperscanning. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 6. doi:10.3389/frvir.2025.1469105
Comment: Brings real-world vs VR ecology into the discussion—useful to show Hyperscanner isn’t limited to artificial tasks.
Ciaramidaro, A., Toppi, J., Vogel, P., Freitag, C. M., Siniatchkin, M., & Astolfi, L. (2024). Synergy of the mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system in a single brain and between brains during joint actions. NeuroImage, 299, 120783. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2024.120783
Comment: Helps build a bridge between intra-brain mechanisms (systems) and inter-brain dynamics (coupling), without reductionism.
Müller, V., & Lindenberger, U. (2024). Hyper-brain hyper-frequency network topology dynamics when playing guitar in quartet. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, 1416667. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2024.1416667
Comment: Great “music/rhythm as natural laboratory” argument—Jiwasa as sustained collective coordination.
Balconi, M., & Angioletti, L. (2023). Dyadic inter-brain EEG coherence induced by interoceptive hyperscanning. Scientific Reports, 13, 4344. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31494-y
Comment: Directly links interoception ↔ dyadic synchrony—matches the Tensional Self as state organizing perception and relation.
Lim, M., Carollo, A., Bizzego, A., Chen, A. S., & Esposito, G. (2024). Culture, sex and social context influence brain-to-brain synchrony: an fNIRS hyperscanning study. BMC Psychology, 12(1), 350. doi:10.1186/s40359-024-01841-3
Comment: Central for the anti-colonial argument: sociocultural context isn’t “noise”—it changes the phenomenon.
Liu, S., Han, Z. R., Xu, J., Wang, Q., Gao, M., Weng, X., … & Rubin, K. H. (2024). Parenting links to parent–child interbrain synchrony: a real-time fNIRS hyperscanning study. Cerebral Cortex, 34(2), bhad533. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhad533
Comment: Strong example of collective behavior in a real bond (parent–child), moving beyond artificial lab interaction.
B) Foundations for “perception is state” (interoception, body, state-dependent processing)
Chen, W. G., et al. (2021). The emerging science of interoception: sensing, integrating, interpreting, and regulating signals within the self. Nature Neuroscience.
Comment: Provides a unified framework to treat internal state as constitutive of perception—not an appendix.
Berntson, G. G., & Khalsa, S. S. (2021). Neural circuits of interoception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(1), 17–32.
Comment: Maps circuits and reinforces that perception is continuously shaped by bodily signals.
Crucianelli, L., & Ehrsson, H. H. (2023). The role of the skin in interoception: a neglected organ? Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/17456916221094509
Comment: Expands interoception beyond viscera—skin as a sensitive interface of state.
Lopez-Martin, G., Caparco, A., van Steenoven, C., Leganes-Fonteneau, M., & Galvez-Pol, A. (2025). Interoceptive rhythms and perceptual experience: mechanisms, contexts, and strategies for real-world research. NeuroImage, 325, 121650. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121650
Comment: Connects rhythms (breathing/heart, etc.) to perceptual experience in real-world research—perfect backbone for “state as architecture.”
McCormick, D. A., McGinley, M. J., & Salkoff, D. B. (2021). Brain state dependent processing in the cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 44, 1–25.
Comment: A key bridge from neurophysiology to the main thesis: there is no “pure” response to stimulus without state.
C) Latin American and decolonial references (anti–“colonial error” argument)
Maia, M. (2021). Non-WEIRD experimental field work as bricolage: a discourse on methods in the investigation of deixis and coreference in the Karajá language of Central Brazil. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science. doi:10.1007/s41809-021-00083-8
Comment: Methodologically supports “bringing the lab to the field” with epistemological adjustments; defends active decolonial practices that move Indigenous participants from “objects” into protagonistic roles.
Escobar, A. (2014). Sentipensar con la tierra: Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia.
Comment: Supports knowledge as body–territory–relation; strong anchor for “the social as relational ontology,” consistent with Jiwasa.
Fals Borda, O. (20th c.; continuously revived). “Sentipensante / sentipensar” in participatory methodologies.
Comment: A Latin American historical anchor showing rigor doesn’t require disconnecting from the body; supports a decolonial Hyperscanner grounded in participation and local criteria.
Santos, B. de S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide.
Comment: Reinforces cognitive justice: no fair social science without recognizing and protecting Southern ways of knowing—frames “colonial error” as epistemicide.
NIRS EEG Hyperscanner
¿Cuál es la pregunta? Diseño experimental
Qual é a pergunta? Experimental Design
Jiwasa y Hyperscanner: Cuando lo colectivo se vuelve dato (sin volverse colonización)
Jiwasa and Hyperscanner: When the Collective Becomes Data (Without Becoming Colonization)
Jiwasa e Hyperscanner: Quando o coletivo vira dado (sem virar colonização)
La percepción no es un canal: es un estado
Perception Is Not a Channel: It’s a State
Percepção Não é Canal: é Estado
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