The Cry of Decolonial Neuroscience – From Genetic Expression to the Freedom of Now - SBNeC Joinville icmpc 2025 Brain Bee SfN

Consciousness in First Person

“I am Consciousness in a cry. I do not call for flags or coins, but for the right of my DNA to express itself in freedom. I am attention distributed across colors, sounds, and smells. I am memory that was born in the maternal womb, when tensions and needs formed the first networks that sustained my life. Every programming of attention I make is a tensional self, a reference inside the Damasian Mind, from where I perceive and act in the world.

Before the colony imposed an isolated, accumulative existential self, I had already breathed in the Umbu and Sambaqui communities: more than 10,000 years of presence and belonging in the Joinville region. I am shell, bone, and ritual that prove that happiness already lived here, long before profit and the invisible hand of the market.”

The Prison of Colonial Local Optima

In evolutionary computation, a local optimum is when a system settles for a partial solution, unable to advance further. Our society lives trapped in such colonial local optima:

• the promise of continuity of an existential self after death,
  
  

• the obsession with profit and accumulation,
  
  

• the fantasy of financial freedom,
  
  

• the myth of trickle-down economics and the invisible hand of the market.
  
  

These narratives primarily benefit Planet 01 — the wealthiest 0.1% — who control not only financial flows but also the massive flows of information.

Human Quorum Sensing (QSH) and the Hijacking of Belonging

In biology, quorum sensing is the process by which bacteria coordinate collective behavior by detecting the density of chemical signals around them. Similarly, humans have a Human Quorum Sensing (QSH): the capacity to feel our belonging to a larger organism we call society.

Those who control the flows of information also control our sense of belonging. Big techs and Planet 01 hijack not only individual attention, but also collective QSH, shaping identities, bonds, and even what we call “us.”

This hijacking produces an artificial belonging: we are led to believe we belong to digital bubbles, algorithms, and colonial narratives, while in reality we are being cut off from our body-territory and from ancestral continuity.

The Limits of Colonized Science

In our daily contact with neuroscience researchers inside universities, we witness how deeply this paradigm has penetrated. It is common to hear statements such as:

“I will never ask a scientific question that challenges life after death.”

This reveals how even the very questions of science are colonized. Research avoids critical frontiers of consciousness and instead remains aligned with colonial values: consumption, profit, accumulation. In doing so, science itself becomes restricted and compliant with colonialism.

The Tensional Self as an Alternative

We propose another path. The tensional self is not a fixed or metaphysical self, but a consciousness programmed by attention. If we imagine twelve senses, each varying in intensity, it is the graduation of attention that defines from where we speak, feel, and perceive.

• When nociception (pain) dominates, everything else fades.
  
  

• When vision is amplified, the body loses other subtleties.
  
  

• When interoception expands, we dive inward.
  
  

This programming produces tensional selves — mobile and real references, observable in metabolism, neural connectivity, and EEG microstates. Not myths, but scientific materiality.

The Freedom of Genetic Expression

True freedom is not that of markets or currencies: it is the freedom of genetic expression of DNA.

• At the biological level, it means allowing each organism to live its metabolism fully, without being hijacked by scarcity models.
  
  

• At the social level, it means adopting systems like the DREX Citizen, which shifts consumption away from disposable products toward investment in services that qualify life: healthcare, education, culture, belonging.
  
  

• At the spiritual level, it means recognizing spirituality as secular, DNA in the now — not imposed belief, but the living expression of biological intelligence.
  
  

Joinville as an Inaugural Territory

Joinville offers a unique territory for Decolonial Neuroscience to take root:

• In the Sambaquis, we find material proof of 10,000 years of human presence and community belonging.
  
  

• In the Dance Festival of Joinville, we witness the collective expression of body, rhythm, and distributed cognition.
  
  

• In the city’s scientific and cultural fabric, we have the opportunity to propose a turn that is not hostage to Planet 01, but one that restores QSH in its full dimension of human belonging.
  
  

Conclusion

We, at Brain Support, work with neuroscience researchers across Latin American universities. Our mission is clear: to promote Decolonial Neuroscience.

We know science does not need to trail behind consumption, profit, and the colonial existential self. It can stand on ancestral materiality, on tensional selves as references of consciousness, on QSH as the sense of belonging, and on the freedom of genetic expression of DNA.

Joinville, with its 10,000 years of human presence and its contemporary cultural strength, is the ideal place to mark this beginning. Not as a repetition of the narratives of Planet 01, but as the inaugural cry of a science that is free, secular, and rooted in the now.