The Collective Brain: Hyperscanning and the Birth of Decolonial Neuroscience
The Collective Brain: Hyperscanning and the Birth of Decolonial Neuroscience
By Jackson Cionek
1. Consciousness in the first person
In my view, consciousness is never isolated — it vibrates between bodies, voices, and silences.
When I observe thirty people connected through fNIRS, I see not just hemodynamic curves, but currents of belonging.
Each person becomes a living territory. When they breathe together, something larger emerges: a collective body.
That experience marks the beginning of Decolonial Neuroscience — a science that does not seek to dominate the other, but to feel-with, to map the life that thinks through bodies.
2. Hyperscanning as a mirror of collectivity
With new systems like the Brite Ultra, it is now possible to measure up to 30 people simultaneously, interacting in real time.
Each participant wears a small sensor that detects cerebral oxygenation changes, revealing the light flow of shared thought.
This technology allows us to see what was once only intuition — the neural synchrony of belonging.
Recent studies show that when two or more brains align emotionally or cooperate in a task, there is increased coherence between frontal and temporal regions — a dynamic coupling that reflects the body-territory in motion, the biology of empathy.
With thirty people, we can now map communities of consciousness, watching when a group falls into rhythm and when it fragments.
3. Fruição, zones, and embodied awareness
In my conceptual framework, I describe three metabolic zones of consciousness:
Zone 1 – Operation and tension. The body executes tasks, consuming energy efficiently.
Zone 2 – Physiological fruição: a state of flow, open and integrated attention.
Zone 3 – Ideological or anxious sequestration. The body repeats patterns without awareness.
These are not moral states, but bio-phenomenological conditions — ways of being in the world.
In hyperscanning studies, when groups successfully move from Zone 1 to Zone 2 — from doing to flowing — we observe higher inter-brain synchrony and lower entropy in HbO/HbR oscillations, signaling a collective state of balanced attention.
It is the moment when thinking becomes feeling-thinking, when body and mind are one.
4. Paper, Rock, and Scissors: modes of the connectome
The Zones describe the metabolic side of consciousness, but the brain’s networks also organize in dynamic connectome modes, which I call Paper, Rock, and Scissors.
They are not equivalent to the Zones — they operate on a different axis, describing how neural networks interact.
Paper represents integration — the network that wraps, listens, and connects.
Rock represents attack–defense and replication — the “fast thinking” of Daniel Kahneman’s System 1: high-performance, automatic, and without metacognition.
In Rock mode, I perform what I already know, quickly and efficiently, but with less openness to novelty.Scissors represents creative rupture — cutting through old patterns to form new connections.
In collective experiments, we can see when a group enters the Rock-Replicator mode:
Frontal networks stabilize, coherence increases, and hemodynamic variability drops.
The brain works in automatic excellence — fast, but unreflective.
When context shifts, Scissors emerges: new long-range connections, slower responses, higher network entropy.
Finally, Paper re-establishes cohesion and belonging.
The Zones show how consciousness feels metabolically;
Paper–Rock–Scissors show how the connectome organizes within that consciousness.
Together, they outline the living topology of mind.
5. The group as a neurobiological organism
In hyperscanning with thirty people, we can study human quorum sensing — how brains self-organize like intelligent colonies.
When all participants enter Zone 2, the inter-brain coherence expands, forming what I call a Collective Fruição Field:
Lower physiological variability,
More stable phase synchronization,
Oscillatory patterns resembling cardio-respiratory coupling.
This state may last only seconds, yet within those seconds collective intelligence arises.
The group becomes a distributed organism of decision-making, where the sum of individual minds is smaller than the flow that unites them.
6. Belonging and body-territory
In Amerindian philosophy, this is the Body-Territory: the awareness that dissolves the inside–outside divide.
Each pulse of oxygen during hyperscanning carries this biological memory of connection.
When the group synchronizes, there is no single leader — there is a field that breathes.
Studying this phenomenon means stepping toward a decolonial neuroscience —
one that does not hierarchize observer and observed, but recognizes that knowledge is born from relation.
Every moment when thirty brains connect, the planet looks back at us.
7. From replication to metacognition
In my conceptual framework, Rock mode is a replicator: essential for performance, but devoid of reflection.
It’s the cultural autopilot — body and action without awareness of being.
Through brief respiratory pauses and guided attention, a group can move from Rock to Scissors, and then to Paper — recovering metacognition.
This transition is visible in fNIRS data: renewed phase variability and greater fronto-parietal connectivity.
Science then becomes an act of re-ligating, not merely measuring.
8. The birth of Decolonial Neuroscience
Decolonial Neuroscience begins when technology no longer serves control but bears witness to life.
Hyperscanning of thirty people reveals what Amerindian traditions have long known:
that mind is a woven network,
that thought is not property of the brain but a movement of the collective.
fNIRS makes visible what ancestral dances always expressed: to think is to move together.
When we join the infrared light of Western science with the living warmth of belonging, new possibilities for consciousness studies emerge — without center, without hierarchy.
Thus the Collective Brain arises: not as a sum of individuals, but as a metabolism of Fruição.
9. References (2020–2025)
Czeszumski, A., Eustergerling, S., Lang, A., Menrath, D., Gerstenberger, M., Schreiber, F., Zuluaga R., König, P. (2020). Hyperscanning: A Valid Method to Study Neural Inter-brain Underpinnings of Social Interaction. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Barreto, C., Lima, C. F., et al. (2021). A New Statistical Approach for fNIRS Hyperscanning to Predict Student Brain Activity from Teacher Brain Activity. Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Li, R., Xia, S., et al. (2021). Dynamic inter-brain synchrony in real-life inter-personal interaction: An fNIRS study. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
Hamilton, A. F. C. (2021). Hyperscanning: Beyond the Hype. Neuron.
Czeszumski, A., et al. (2022). Cooperative Behavior Evokes Interbrain Synchrony: An fNIRS Hyperscanning Meta-analysis. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Wang, H., et al. (2025). An fNIRS hyperscanning study on the influence of team type and sex factors on athletes’ interpersonal trust behaviours. Scientific Reports.
Carollo, A., et al. (2024). Hyperscanning literature after two decades: Review and methodological advances. NeuroImage.
Müller, H., Büchel, D., et al. (2025). Monitoring cognitive load while playing exergames in older adults: an EEG study. Scientific Reports.
Esteves, D., Andrade, A., Vourvopoulos, A. (2025). When embodiment matters most: a confirmatory study on VR priming in motor imagery BCI training. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Reiser, J. E., Chuang, L. L., Wascher, E. (2025). Audiovisual Cues and Task-Switching While Walking: An EEG/ERP Study. Psychophysiology.
Zappa, A., León-Cabrera, P., François, C. (2025). Alpha and beta desynchronization during consolidation of newly learned words. NeuroImage.
Müller, C. O., Bannier, E., Maurel, P. (2025). Evaluating the effects of multimodal EEG-fNIRS neurofeedback for motor imagery. PLOS One.
