Extended Yãy hã mĩy -  Belonging and High Performance Without Capture

The body learns before it can explain

Let us imagine a child entering a collective song.

The child does not yet know all the words. They observe the breathing of older people, follow their gestures, and perceive when to approach, step back, sing, or remain silent. They repeat, make mistakes, adjust the body, and try again.

The child is not merely copying.

They are searching for a place in the world.

Long before writing, manuals, and digital learning platforms, human societies transmitted complex knowledge through observation, repetition, song, storytelling, participation, and embodied memory. Yet this does not authorize us to remove an Indigenous concept from its world and define it according to our own needs.

In the exhibition Indigenous Worlds, Yãy hã mĩy was presented by Tikmũ’ũn curators, including Isael and Sueli Maxakali. UFMG recommends approaching these concepts without immediately translating them into external categories. They are openings into other relational worlds, not tools available for unrestricted academic appropriation.

Yãy hã mĩy and Extended Yãy hã mĩy

We must therefore distinguish between two formulations:

Yãy hã mĩy belongs to the Tikmũ’ũn world.

Extended Yãy hã mĩy is a BrainLatam theoretical hypothesis arising from an encounter with that concept, without claiming to translate it, replace it, or speak on behalf of the Tikmũ’ũn.

In BrainLatam texts, this hypothesis appears in the expression:

To imitate oneself into Being in order to transcend oneself into Being.

We imitate gestures, words, beliefs, tensions, ways of loving, working, praying, and belonging. Repetition participates in the formation of habits; habits may sustain customs; customs may organize beliefs and identities.

But transcending oneself into Being means recognizing that we use these pathways without being condemned to remain inside them.

I learned through repetition, but I am greater than what I learned to repeat.

BrainLatam uses the expression biological faith for the bodily confidence that emerges when an action has been practiced until it can be performed with greater fluency. This is an operational metaphor, not an established neuroscientific category.

Synapses do not possess faith, and no neural configuration proves the truth of a religious belief. Science may investigate practice, automation, prediction, coordination, and learning. The movement from these processes toward “biological faith” belongs to BrainLatam’s theoretical interpretation.

Science supports parts of the hypothesis, not the whole

Repeated practice can transform a sequence that was initially slow and deliberate into an action that becomes faster, more precise, and apparently effortless. Recent research on motor learning describes changes in the neural circuits involved in highly practiced sequences.

This supports the idea that the body incorporates skills.

It does not prove that every belief is a motor habit, nor that there is a specific neural circuit for Extended Yãy hã mĩy.

Repetition may also release attention. When a musician no longer needs to consciously decide every movement, they can listen to the ensemble, perceive variations, and respond creatively. When a team knows its procedures, it can react more effectively to the unexpected.

Yet automation also carries a risk: a pathway that was once effective may continue to be performed after it has stopped protecting life.

Skill grows when repetition remains open to correction.

Capture begins when repetition becomes impossible to interrupt.

When rhythm creates a “we”

Mexican researchers Arodi Farrera and Gabriel Ramos-Fernández have shown that collective rhythms may emerge through interaction among people. Coordination can appear in movement and in physiological and neural dynamics.

Collective rhythm is not merely the sum of individuals following an order. It may be a property produced through their relationship.

This does not mean that a single shared consciousness is created. It helps us understand how presence, movement, and shared timing may strengthen belonging.

Belonging can sustain courage, care, learning, and mutual trust.

But it can also capture.

Repeated statements become familiar and may begin to feel true, even when they are false or contradict previous knowledge. Recent research on the illusory truth effect shows that repetition can influence belief in misinformation, conspiracy narratives, and the willingness to share content.

The same mechanism that refines a gesture may therefore help crystallize a lie.

The question is not only:

“How many times did we repeat it?”

It is:

“Did repetition expand our capacity to perceive, or did it remove our freedom to revise?”

Land, song, and Tikmũ’ũn learning

Lúcio Flávio Coelho Maxakali explains that, for the Tikmũ’ũn, any place can become a school. In the kuxex, the ritual house, children learn to sing, paint, fish, and participate in community life.

In his research written in the Maxakali language, school must walk together with the kuxex, the forest, and the community calendar.

Israel Maxakali summarizes this relationship in a powerful statement:

“Without land, there is no song.”

Without forest, food, seeds, differentiated education, and the possibility of teaching children are also lost.

Song cannot be separated from territory and transformed into a cognitive technique for increasing school performance. It belongs to a network of relationships among people, Yãmĩyxop, food, land, memory, and collective continuity.

Research conducted with the Hãm Yĩkopit Network also describes research and schooling as processes intertwined with the Earth and constructed with Tikmũ’ũn researchers rather than merely about them.

This changes our question.

Instead of asking how to “use” Yãy hã mĩy, we must ask:

How can we allow the encounter to transform our own ways of teaching, researching, and belonging?

Embodied memory in archaeology

Brazilian archaeologist Daniela La Chioma examined Mochica and Nasca images and showed that musicians and sound instruments occupied structured social, political, and religious roles in the pre-Hispanic Andes.

Archaeology cannot reconstruct exactly what each participant felt. However, it shows that sound, rhythm, and performance participated in collective organization long before contemporary theories of learning.

Brazilian sambaquis also preserve traces of repeated relationships among bodies, food, movement, and territory. Teeth and dental calculus can reveal aspects of diet, plant processing, health, and daily practices.

These findings should not be described as a single “Umbu gastronomy.” Sambaquis and the Umbu archaeological tradition are different and internally diverse contexts.

Their importance lies elsewhere: bodies preserve traces of the environments, repetitions, and forms of knowledge that sustained them.

A consciousness situated in the Atlantic Forest

My genetic report may reveal fragments of a very ancient biological history. But no genetic marker determines my mission, proves an Indigenous identity, or grants me ownership of a territory.

My commitment emerges from a situated history.

I am a descendant of Damasio Moreira de Castilho, the son of Aleixo Cionek, born in Araucária, and Leony Castilho Cionek, born in União da Vitória. I was born in the region of Goioerê.

To say that I am a child of the Atlantic Forest is not to speak on its behalf.

It is to recognize that my Body-Territory received water, food, language, and the possibility of consciousness from a biome that has been profoundly wounded—and that this belonging creates responsibility.

BrainLatam may be understood as a consciousness situated in the Atlantic Forest that seeks dialogue with the different biomes of Latin America.

Not to capture them as metaphors or financial assets, and not to represent their peoples.

Rather, to transform origin into care.

This is also Extended Yãy hã mĩy applied to BrainLatam itself.

We inherit words, customs, beliefs, tensions, and forms of belonging. We can recognize what entered our bodies through repetition and decide what should continue, what must be transformed, and what must be interrupted because it destroys the biome that made our lives possible.

High performance is the ability to stop

In the NeuroEducation of Weichö, high performance does not mean producing at maximum intensity until the Body-Territory becomes ill.

It means mobilizing one’s possibilities with:

health;
awareness;
meaning;
belonging;
continuity;
collective responsibility;
and the freedom to interrupt a destructive path.

We might evaluate performance through different questions:

Can I question what I repeat?

Can I leave the ritual without losing my dignity?

Can I disagree and still belong?

Does my skill expand the group’s autonomy, or make everyone dependent on me?

Does my performance protect the Body-Territory and the biome that sustain it?

We can now formulate the central hypothesis:

Extended Yãy hã mĩy is the BrainLatam proposal that we imitate in order to learn, repeat in order to incorporate, and belong in order to develop capacities. Transcendence begins when we can observe what we have incorporated, create beyond the model, and interrupt repetition when it stops caring for life.

The highest performance may not be repeating perfectly.

It may be entering the collective rhythm without disappearing into it—and preserving enough awareness to stop when everyone else continues walking in the wrong direction.

How can we use repetition, belief, ritual, and belonging to expand human capacities without surrendering consciousness to blind obedience?

Commented references

BrainLatam (2025). Biological Faith, Synapses, and Extended Yãy hã mĩy.
Introduces BrainLatam’s theoretical formulation of biological faith and Extended Yãy hã mĩy as hypotheses open to scientific, philosophical, and intercultural investigation.

Maxakali, Lúcio Flávio Coelho (2025). For Us, School Is Everywhere.
Shows, through Tikmũ’ũn authorship, the relationships among school, kuxex, forest, song, research, and community life.

Silva, Paula Cristina Pereira (2022). Xi hõnhã? What Now? Let Us Become Researchers.
Describes shared knowledge production with Tikmũ’ũn researchers and the Hãm Yĩkopit Network.

Farrera, A.; Ramos-Fernández, G. (2022). Collective Rhythm as an Emergent Property During Human Social Coordination.
Examines how collective rhythms may emerge through behavioral, physiological, and neural interaction.

Mizes, K. et al. (2023). Dissociating the Contributions of Sensorimotor Striatum to Automatic and Visually Guided Motor Sequences.
Shows how repeated practice can make motor sequences faster, more precise, and increasingly automatic.

Udry, J.; Barber, S. (2024). The Illusory Truth Effect.
Explains how repetition can increase belief in false information, revealing the boundary between learning and capture.

La Chioma, D. (2023). Musicians and Sound Instruments in the Pre-Hispanic Andean World.
Investigates the social and political-religious roles of music and performance in Mochica and Nasca contexts.