Free Latin America - Decolonial Neuroscience with NIRS–EEG Hyperscanning 

Decolonial Neuroscience to Study Belonging, Leadership, and Collective Intelligence in the Americas - NIRS–EEG Hyperscanning for 5 Participants

For much of the recent history of science, the human brain was studied as if it were an isolated system. Most experiments placed individuals alone in laboratories, performing artificial tasks while their neural signals were recorded.

This model produced important discoveries. But it also left a fundamental gap.

Human beings do not live in isolation.
They live in groups, territories, and cultures.

The new generation of neuroscientific technologies — especially EEG, fNIRS, and multimodal hyperscanning — is beginning to make possible something that until recently was impossible: studying the human brain while people interact with one another in real time.

This methodological shift opens a historic opportunity:
to scientifically investigate dimensions of human experience that were preserved for centuries by the peoples of the Americas, even in the face of European colonization.

Among them:

• collective belonging

• community intelligence

• distributed leadership

• the body–territory relationship

• cooperative forms of social organization

These dimensions have always existed.
What was missing was scientific instrumentation capable of measuring them.

Multimodal hyperscanning: five brains, one system

An experimental platform with 5 simultaneous participants can integrate:

• 32-channel EEG per participant

• fNIRS with 8 sources and 8 detectors per participant

• ECG for heart-rate variability

• respiration

• GSR (galvanic skin response)

• EMG

• 3D motion sensor

All signals can be synchronized through architectures such as LSL (Lab Streaming Layer).

This makes it possible to observe simultaneously:

• neural dynamics

• physiological regulation

• body movement

• social interaction

in real human groups.

Instead of studying only the individual, neuroscience begins to study the collective as a dynamic system.

Jiwasa: measurable collective intelligence

In several Andean cultures, the concept of Jiwasa expresses the idea that intelligence emerges from the relationship between people.

It is not only “I.”
It is “we who think together.”

With hyperscanning, this idea is no longer merely philosophical.
It can be investigated through:

• inter-brain synchronization

• group neural coherence

• cardiorespiratory coupling

• attentional alignment

Recent research shows that people in interaction can display spontaneous neural synchronization, especially during moments of shared understanding.

This suggests that groups may function as distributed cognitive systems.

Body-territory and collective physiology

Another important concept in Latin American epistemologies is body-territory.

It proposes that the human body cannot be understood in isolation from the environment and social relations.

In neuroscientific terms, this can be studied through signals such as:

• interoception

• respiration

• heart-rate variability

• body movement

When several people share an environment and a task, their physiological states may begin to align partially.

This phenomenon may reflect processes of:

• empathy

• cooperation

• leadership

• belonging

Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3 in the collective

The interaction between language, emotion, and physiology can produce different cognitive states in groups.

A simple model to investigate this includes three possible states.

Zone 1 — automatic processing
The group responds to narratives quickly and with little reflection.

Zone 3 — narrative capture
Rigid narratives seize the group’s collective critical sense.

Zone 2 — collective critical fruition
The group maintains emotional belonging without losing investigative capacity.

With hyperscanning, it becomes possible to observe physiological and neural markers associated with these collective states.

For example:

• excessive neural synchronization may indicate narrative conformity

• greater physiological variability may reflect cognitive exploration

• abrupt changes may indicate moments of collective insight

Emergent leadership

Another important dimension is emergent leadership.

In many human groups, leadership is not fixed.
It emerges dynamically depending on the situation.

With simultaneous recordings of multiple brains, it becomes possible to investigate:

• who initiates cognitive alignments

• who regulates the group’s emotional states

• who stabilizes or destabilizes narratives

These dynamics can be observed through:

• temporal precedence in neural activity

• physiological coupling

• influence on collective decisions

Decolonial neuroscience

These approaches point to something larger:
a possible decolonial neuroscience.

This does not mean rejecting modern science.
It means expanding its questions.

For centuries, Indigenous and Latin American knowledge systems were treated as mythology or folklore.

Today, technologies such as EEG, fNIRS, and hyperscanning make it possible to scientifically investigate many of these ideas.

This may open space for a science that recognizes that cultural knowledge can also generate valuable experimental hypotheses.

Science, belonging, and new economic systems

The scientific study of collective belonging may have implications that go beyond neuroscience.

Highly individualistic societies often face:

• social polarization

• institutional fragility

• crises of trust

Emerging systems such as PIX, retail CBDCs, DREX, and the concept of DREX Cidadão may create new models of economic organization based on financial inclusion and social belonging.

These structures may function analogously to biological systems:
just as cells receive energy to keep the organism alive, citizens may receive minimal flows of resources to sustain social and economic participation.

Social neuroscience can help investigate how belonging, economic security, and collective cooperation influence the cognitive and emotional states of populations.

A new scientific field

Perhaps we are facing the beginning of a new field of research:
the neuroscience of collective intelligence and human belonging.

With multimodal hyperscanning technologies, it becomes possible to scientifically study:

• cooperative cultures

• distributed leadership

• collective cognition

• resilient social systems

These questions are especially relevant in the Americas, where Indigenous and Latin American peoples preserved, despite centuries of colonization, complex forms of social organization based on community, territory, and reciprocity.

Transforming these traditions into testable scientific hypotheses may represent not only an advance for neuroscience.

It may also help build new models of society based on science, evidence, and collective belonging.

References

A. Methodological core

Babiloni & Astolfi (2014) — Social neuroscience and hyperscanning techniques: Past, present and future.
A classic review that helps justify the shift from the isolated brain to real social interaction; excellent for the historical introduction of the field.

Czeszumski et al. (2020) — Hyperscanning: A Valid Method to Study Neural Inter-brain Underpinnings of Social Interaction.
One of the best reviews for supporting the validity, limitations, modalities, and inter-brain synchrony analyses in EEG/fNIRS.

Nam et al. (2020) — Brain-to-Brain Neural Synchrony During Social Interactions: A Systematic Review on Hyperscanning Studies.
Very useful for presenting a systematic overview: modalities, paradigms, applications, and the fact that hyperscanning measures two or more people simultaneously.

Kothe et al. (2025) — The Lab Streaming Layer for Synchronized Multimodal Recording.
A key reference for justifying multimodal synchronization via LSL in EEG, fNIRS, ECG, GSR, respiration, and movement, with millisecond-level temporal precision.

B. Leadership, collective intelligence, and group dynamics

Jiang et al. (2015) — Leader emergence through interpersonal neural synchronization.
Essential for the section on emergent leadership: it shows leadership associated with greater neural synchronization between leader and followers.

Reinero, Dikker & Van Bavel (2021) — Inter-brain synchrony in teams predicts collective performance.
Perhaps the most important reference for your argument on measurable collective intelligence: inter-brain synchronization predicted collective performance better than self-reported group identification.

Liu et al. (2021) — Team-work, Team-brain: Exploring synchrony and team interdependence in a nine-person drumming task via multiparticipant hyperscanning and inter-brain network topology with fNIRS.
Essential because it moves beyond dyads into larger groups, showing that there is already a real basis for multi-brain modeling in teams.

Zhang, Jia & Wang (2021) — Interbrain Synchrony of Team Collaborative Decision-Making: An fNIRS Hyperscanning Study.
A strong foundation for the section on collective decision-making, cooperation, and multi-brain processing in team contexts.

Li et al. (2025) — Bidirectional information flow in cooperative learning reflects emergent leadership.
Highly aligned with your theme because it already addresses directionality, information flow, and emergent leadership in cooperative settings.

Woolley et al. (2010) — Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.
Not neuroscience, but indispensable for grounding the concept of collective intelligence in groups of 2 to 5 people. It serves as a conceptual bridge to Jiwasa.

C. Body-territory, collective physiology, and multimodality

Reindl et al. (2022) — Multimodal hyperscanning reveals that synchrony of body and mind are distinct in mother-child dyads.
Excellent for arguing that neural, autonomic, and motor synchronies are not the same thing — this helps a great deal in operationalizing “body-territory” without reductionism.

Tomashin, Gordon & Wallot (2022) — Interpersonal Physiological Synchrony Predicts Group Cohesion.
Excellent for your section on group cohesion, showing that physiological synchrony in groups predicts the psychological feeling of cohesion.

3 complementary references for the decolonial framework

Fernández-Theoduloz (2024) — Research in Latin America from a decolonial perspective: Challenges of producing socially situated knowledge.
Useful for explicitly justifying the critique of WEIRD bias and the need to produce situated knowledge in Latin America.

Wildcat & Voth (2023) — Indigenous relationality: definitions and methods.
An excellent theoretical bridge for grounding Indigenous relationality as a matrix for scientific hypothesis generation, rather than as “folklore.”

Caretta & Pepa (2024) — Decolonising pedagogy in practice: cuerpo-territorio to consolidate students’ learning.
Not neuroscience, but very helpful in legitimizing cuerpo-territorio as a situated and embodied form of knowledge.

Posso também transformar isso em um inglês mais acadêmico, pronto para artigo, abstract ou proposta de projeto.