Dialogical Multiplication and Indigenous Psychology
How to let psychology listen without erasing the Other

 (First-Person Consciousness • Decolonial Neuroscience • Brain Bee • The Feeling and Knowing Taá)

The Feeling and Knowing Taá — opening a crack for decolonization

I grew up hearing that Psychology “explains” people.
That the specialist knows more about me than I do myself.
That Indigenous peoples are “objects of study,” not authors of theory.

When I start to feel this in my body, I notice a discomfort:
my chest tightens when someone describes an entire people as a “clinical case” or a “sample.”
My breathing changes when I read research that talks about Indigenous peoples,
but almost never with them, and even less from them.

I also notice that even my words have been colonized.
The language I use to think the world was shaped to reduce me:

• to reduce my body to a defective machine,
  
  

• my mind to deficit,
  
  

• my spirituality to superstition,
  
  

• my politics to consumption and productivity.
  
  

That is how so many people in Psychology avoid asking questions that could reveal what colonial science does not yet know how to name.
But when I feel my body before I think — when Taá manifests — I realize there is no separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory).
What colonizes is not only history: it is the word that stops us from existing as whole beings.

Every time I read Danilo Silva Guimarães in Dialogical Multiplication Principles for an Indigenous Psychology, I feel exactly this:
a crack opening.
Psychology stops being a lens that frames Indigenous people as “exotic objects”
and becomes a place of encounter, confrontation, and multiplication of voices.

What the book asks: who speaks for whom in psychology?

I read this book as a strong question placed directly in my chest:

Is it possible to do Psychology without repeating colonization inside the theory itself?

Guimarães starts from an uncomfortable recognition:
a large part of the psychology we study is WEIRD —
done with Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic subjects
and then applied as if it were “universal.”

The Indigenous psychology he proposes is not an “exotic subfield,”
but a deep reconfiguration of:

• who speaks,
  
  

• from where they speak,
  
  

• with whom they speak,
  
  

• and what is considered “data” and what is considered “noise.”
  
  

Instead of reducing Indigenous peoples to “cases,” he asks:

What if psychological theory itself began to be born from dialogue with these peoples?
What if research were not data extraction, but encounter between worlds?

Methods: dialogical multiplication instead of extractive collection

The book does not present a rigid “protocol,”
but a way of being in the field that strongly echoes what Marcus Maia describes as bricolage with Karajá and Javaé peoples.

Some axes I feel in my body as I read:

Dialogical encounter
The researcher does not arrive with a ready-made experiment,
but with openness to transform their own questions
based on what they hear and live with the community.

Multiplication of perspectives
Instead of one theory that “explains everything,”
the author talks about dialogical multiplication:
letting multiple voices — Indigenous, academic, spiritual, political —
coexist and mutually tension one another.

Co-authorship and metacognition
Indigenous people stop being passive “participants” and become

• co-thinkers of the problem,
  
  

• co-authors of reflection,
  
  

producing meta-comments about their own experience.

Psychology as situated practice
Method here is not just statistics or protocol:
it is how I arrive, how I listen, how I allow myself to be affected,
and what I give back to the community.

It is a methodology that resonates with our Reference Avatars.
When I take the position of the Olmeca Avatar, I see this as:
a way of looking at psychological phenomena through living culture —
rituals, narratives, cosmologies — without trying to squeeze everything into pre-defined European categories.

When I bring in the DANA Avatar, I feel the book as a call
to recognize the intelligence of collective DNA:
the way a people regulates its way of existing, feeling and caring for the mind
across generations.

Results: a psychology that multiplies, not reduces

The effect of this approach is profound:

• The Indigenous person stops being an “informant” and becomes an epistemic partner.
  
  

• Research stops searching for “general laws of the psyche”
  and starts welcoming distinct ways of being mind.
  
  

• Conflicts, misunderstandings, differences in vocabulary
  cease to be “noise” and become material for thought.
  
  

In practice, this means:

• new categories to talk about suffering, healing, relationship, body, dream;
  
  

• the possibility of rethinking notions such as “individual,” “trauma,” “mental illness”
  from Amerindian cosmologies;
  
  

• openness so that spirituality is not treated as delusion,
  but as a legitimate dimension of experience (Utupe, Xapiri, Pei Utupe).
  
  

Reading with our concepts

Damasian Mind, Jiwasa and Human Quorum Sensing

When I read Guimarães, I feel the Damasian Mind being extended to the collective plane:
it is not only one body that feels,

it is a we that feels — a psychological Jiwasa.

The Indigenous psychology proposed there is, in a way,
a psychology of Human Quorum Sensing:
how bodies, voices, spirits and memories
mutually regulate one another in villages, cities, rivers, territories.

Zones 1 / 2 / 3

• Zone 3 is colonized psychology,
  applying scales and tests without asking if they make sense in that world.
  
  

• Zone 1 is the automatic application of protocols:
  quick diagnosis, classification, manual.
  
  

• Zone 2 appears when the researcher accepts being destabilized,
  listens without knowing in advance,
  allows their own theory to be affected by the encounter.
  
  

Guimarães is constantly leading us into this Zone 2 of encounter.
It is there that Psychology becomes more than a tool of control:
it becomes a space of joint creation.

Reference Avatars

If I choose a frame through which to read this book,
I feel it speaks especially with:

• Olmeca Avatar – cultural, symbolic and historical gaze on experience;
  
  

• Yagé Avatar – expanded states of consciousness, dream, vision, ritual;
  
  

• DANA Avatar – intelligence of the collective DNA organizing care practices.
  
  

These avatars remind us that there is not just one legitimate point of view.
Psychology becomes a field of multiple windows onto the same living territory.

Where science adjusts our ideas

Before, I might have believed that:

• evidence-based psychology = psychology with statistics;
  
  

• spirituality = bias, error, superstition;
  
  

• Indigenous peoples = “special samples” to be compared to the WEIRD norm.
  
  

After walking with this book, I realize that:

• evidence also includes narratives, rituals, memories,
  as long as they are worked with dialogical rigor;
  
  

• spirituality is a structuring dimension of experience,
  not noise to be filtered out;
  
  

• there is no “universal human standard” measured from Western laboratories.
  
  

Evidence-based science is not abandoned here.
It is displaced:
from the “view from above” to the “view with.”

Implications for education, health and politics in Latin America

Psychology training

• Curricula need to incorporate Indigenous psychology not as a curiosity,
  but as a central axis for thinking the human in plural territories.
  
  

Mental health policy

• Care programs in villages and urban peripheries
  must include local practices of healing, listening and ritual
  as legitimate parts of the system, not as folkloric appendices.
  
  

Research and funding

• Agencies need to support projects in which Indigenous peoples are
  co-authors, co-thinkers and co-decision-makers about methodology and data use.
  
  

LATAM constitutions and laws

• A truly Indigenous psychology can help shape
  new ways of thinking collective rights, territory,
  spirituality and mental health as inseparable dimensions.
  
  

Scientific search keywords

“Danilo Silva Guimarães dialogical multiplication indigenous psychology Brazil non-WEIRD decolonial psychology experimental fieldwork”

If we want a Psychology for Latin America and not just in Latin America,
we need to learn to multiply voices, worlds and bodies —
until science stops speaking about us
and finally starts speaking with us and from us.

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Architecture That Thinks With Me - Turning corners and the attentional cost of built environments

Auditory Approach Bias From Birth - How newborns and adults code the desire to listen

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Reproducibility in fNIRS - When can I trust the hemodynamic curve I see?

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Mixed Reality and Decision-Making - How the brain evaluates prototypes and hybrid worlds

Intense Exercise and the Awakening of Zone 2 - The hemodynamics of effort and the body that generates intelligence

Buttoning a Shirt - Everyday actions as windows into attention, gesture, and consciousness

Depression, tDCS, and the Prefrontal Cortex - Reigniting silent circuits

Designing fNIRS Studies in Real-World Environments - Why science must step outside the laboratory to exist

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Cold Water and the Brain - Oxygenation, cold, and the consciousness of the limit

Walking After Stroke - Cognitive–motor interference in everyday life

Balance and the Cerebellum in Parkinson’s Disease - Movement, tensions, and reorganization of the Body-Territory

Freezing of Gait and the Loss of the Body’s Own Quorum - When the body stops trusting the next step

Children With Cochlear Implants - Learning to hear through the brain, not just the device

Emotional Processing in Children With Oppositional Behavior - Regulation, conflict, and the birth of Tensional Selves

Mild Cognitive Impairment - Early hemodynamic signs and presence in the world

Pain, Apathy, and Depression in Dementia - When feeling and thinking stop walking together

Cognitive Load - How much does fNIRS really feel my mental effort?

The Brain in Daily Life -Assisted horsemanship, sport, and embodied enjoyment

Linguistic Jiwasa - When language thinks the world

Dialogical Multiplication and Indigenous Psychology - How to let psychology listen without erasing the Other

The Feeling and Knowing Taá of Christmas 

Republican Capitalism of Spirits without Bodies

NIRS fNIRS EEG ERP Multimodal NIRS-EEG

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