Audiovisual and Movement: How the Brain Switches Tasks While Walking
Audiovisual and Movement: How the Brain Switches Tasks While Walking
Reiser, J. E., Rinkenauer, G., Arnau, S., Chuang, L. L., & Wascher, E. (2025).
How Do Humans Process Audiovisual Cues for Task-Switching While Walking?
Psychophysiology, 62(8).
First-Person Consciousness Brain Bee Ideas
Walking is the most human gesture of thought.
It is the movement that connects the body to the landscape, the inner rhythm to the flow of the world.
While we walk, the brain dances — it changes direction, adjusts priorities, redistributes energy.
Each step is an unconscious decision between balance and intention.
Reiser et al. (2025) reveal the hidden architecture of this cognitive ballet: how the brain alternates between auditory and visual tasks while walking, maintaining bodily coherence and attentional stability.
Walking and thinking are, in truth, the same process — a continuous feedback loop between perception and action.
sfn 2025
NIRS EEG ERP BCI fNIRS
Decolonial Neuroscience
Brain Bee Ideas
The Study
The authors investigated how humans process audiovisual cues while walking and switching between cognitive tasks.
Using mobile EEG, they recorded cortical activity in natural locomotion — a milestone in ecological neuroscience.
Their findings show that walking does not impair cognitive performance; the brain reorganizes its networks to compensate for the dual demands of perception and motion.
Task-switching activates distinct event-related potentials (ERPs), reflecting the energetic cost of shifting attention without losing postural control.
In other words, the brain allocates cognitive energy according to bodily movement — a metabolically tuned symphony.
Zone 2 and Cognitive Sensory Flow
Zone 2 is the metabolic and perceptual state in which the body is active but effortless — functional oxygenation between 92 and 94 % SpO₂, with minimal cognitive resistance.
It is the natural realm of Fruição — the embodied enjoyment where movement flows without control.
During walking, Zone 2 manifests as dynamic balance between body and mind.
EEG data show that theta- and alpha-band oscillations adjust to sustain open attention, while motor and visual cortices share energetic resources.
The brain enters a mode of distributed attention, ready to shift tasks without breaking sensory continuity.
Conscious walking is, therefore, the kinetic expression of the Damasian Mind — a state in which to think is to move, and to move is to think.
Motor and Audiovisual Synchrony
The study demonstrates that auditory and visual stimuli integrate dynamically during locomotion, supported by synchronization among premotor, occipital, and parietal cortices.
This synchrony reflects temporal coherence, enabling the brain to merge sound and image while the body moves.
As we walk and hear, the brain generates a predictive rhythm — an internal metric anticipating the next step and the next sound.
This sensorimotor synchrony is the basis of Cognitive Sensory Flow, the coupling of perception, movement, and decision.
The body becomes the brain’s metronome.
Thinking in Movement — The Word That Moves
During a visit to the Casa de Culturas Indígenas at USP, I lived an experience that gave this science a heartbeat.
There, no one is invited to speak — something moves you to speak.
The word is not decided; it happens in the body, like a current passing through the collective.
When that force reached me, I stood up without planning.
My body carried me to the center, and I began to walk in circles.
There was no script, only movement and presence.
Speech emerged from a place older than logic — a state of First-Person Consciousness, where the body thinks and thought breathes.
As I moved, I realized the circle was not merely physical but a living organism.
Each step adjusted to the cadence of those around me; their silence held my voice.
I could feel Human Quorum Sensing — a collective, non-verbal intelligence regulating rhythm, tone, and even meaning.
I was not “speaking to” the group; we were thinking together.
At that moment I understood that Zone 2 is not only a physiological equilibrium but also a territory of shared listening.
Oxygenation becomes clarity; clarity becomes belonging.
The circle embodies the Damasian Mind: interoception and proprioception resonating in communion.
There, the word does not belong to the speaker — it belongs to the air, the ground, and those who listen.
It is the Body-Territory thinking collectively, the metabolic co-creation of an idea born from shared breath.
To speak, in that context, is to be spoken by life itself.
The Damasian Mind in Motion
In the Damasian Mind, consciousness arises from the integration of interoception (the body felt from within) and proprioception (the body felt in space).
Walking unites them: each step aligns the body to gravity and the mind to the environment.
Reiser et al. show that locomotion activates fronto-parietal networks responsible for attentional control while modulating sensorimotor regions that stabilize posture.
Thus, thinking in motion becomes an intelligence distributed between brain and ground.
Walking is, in this sense, a natural example of embodied consciousness — thought that breathes and moves.
Fruição and the Art of Task Switching
Task-switching is usually framed as a cognitive cost, yet through the lens of Fruição, it becomes an exercise in energetic flexibility.
While moving, the brain doesn’t stop one task to start another; it flows from one pattern to the next, like water shifting shape without losing continuity.
This cognitive fluidity depends on the synchrony between motor and sensory systems — a dance of micro-adjustments between intention and perception.
The body is not distracted by the environment; it uses the environment as reference.
Fruição is, therefore, the way the brain changes tasks without fragmentation — the performance of consciousness when the body is fully present.
Experimental Evidence
The study revealed that:
Task-switching while walking produces larger ERP amplitudes (P3, N2) in parietal regions;
Shorter latencies in visual and auditory responses indicate greater integrative efficiency during motion;
Inter-hemispheric coherence increases in mobile EEG, showing that the brain stabilizes perception while redistributing motor effort.
These findings reinforce that human cognition is optimized in movement, not in stillness.
The moving body is the brain thinking with rhythm.
Western traditions separated thought from action, spirit from body, knowledge from walking.
But in Amerindian cultures — and now in ecological neuroscience — walking is a mode of thinking.
To think while walking is to feel oneself as part of the territory.
Reiser et al. empirically confirm what the Path has always taught:
the mind does not live inside the brain — it lives inside movement.
Decolonial Neuroscience reclaims this principle: intelligence exists in the step, the rhythm, the ground that responds.
With each movement, the brain updates itself — and the world reconfigures as part of the body.
Conclusion
Reiser et al. (2025) remind us that walking is continuous thought.
Each task shift, each sound and gaze, are variations of a single gesture — consciousness in motion.
The brain, when moving, does not divide attention — it distributes it metabolically.
Walking is the silent symphony of the Damasian Mind:
a body adjusting to the rhythm of the world, and a world learning the rhythm of the body.
As long as there is movement, there will be thought.
And perhaps, in the beat between sound and step, consciousness will rediscover its purest form of Fruição —
to exist in movement and belonging.
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