From Question to Experiment: Neuroscientific Avatars for a Decolonial Agenda at OHBM 2026

OHBM 2026 confirms an important movement in contemporary neuroscience: the brain can no longer be thought of only as an isolated, motionless organ treated as the universal measure of human experience. When the program brings together themes such as human cognition in naturalistic environments, Language Across Brain Systems and the Lifespan, Modeling and Analysis of Multimodal Data, AI and the Analysis of brain structure and function, Neuroinformatics and Data Sharing, sleep, memory, creativity, social synchrony, and multimodality, what emerges is a growing openness to questions that are more sensitive to context, variability, the body, and lived life.

It is precisely at this point that we want to make an invitation to the Latin American community that will be present at OHBM 2026 — or following its debates. Not only to follow new methods, new models, and new datasets, but to ask something deeper: what changes when the lens through which we formulate the scientific question changes?

The Neuroscientific Avatars of Perception were created as a practical response to that question. They are not decorative characters, nor a language parallel to scientific work. They are conceptual and operational lenses for formulating different questions, designing more sensitive experiments, and interpreting data with greater ecological, cultural, bodily, and inferential depth. In the foundational document, their function is already stated clearly: each avatar acts as a framing guide, orienting what to ask, what to control, what to measure, and how to interpret the phenomenon. Its central formulation is strong: the depth of the question modulates what can next be perceived, and a good question defines the framing, the experimental design, and the kind of data that will make sense.

Our proposal begins with a simple conviction: change the lens, and the question changes; change the question, and the experiment changes; change the experiment, and the kind of evidence neuroscience can produce changes as well. When the question changes, so do the variables, the unit of analysis, the metric, the control strategy, and the reach of the inference. And at a moment when OHBM 2026 is discussing everything from cognition in naturalistic environments to reproducible EEG, federated data, language, development, AI, neuroinformatics, sleep, memory, and creativity, Latin America has much to contribute by offering not only new data, but also new lenses for asking questions.

It is in that spirit that we present the avatars: as a working proposal for researchers who want to formulate decolonial questions and experiments with science and evidence. Each avatar highlights a dimension that is often reduced in traditional neuroscience — living neurodynamics, first-person affect, culture and territory, mode shifting, body-territory, collective synchrony, causality, and living organization. The goal is not to replace method, but to demand better method. It is not to abandon measurement, but to measure more carefully what has too often been treated as noise, background, or exception.

A shared foundation: framing, connectomes, and zones

In the source material, the avatars are articulated through a functional reading in three modes — Scissors, Rock, and Paper — with a bridge to Zones 1, 2, and 3. Scissors refers to the prefrontal mode of cutting, classifying, and control; Rock to the sensorimotor mode of habit and reaction; and Paper to enjoyment with metacognition, that is, critical reorganization with bodily regulation. This architecture already suggests that perception and behavior cannot be reduced to a single metric or a single circuit. They emerge through functional combinations, bodily states, and contextual conditions.

The strength of the avatars lies exactly there: they allow that architecture to be turned into operational questions.

1) Brainlly — Living neurodynamics of perception

Scientific function: a lens for investigating the neurophysiological dynamics of states, transitions, and couplings among neural activity, glia, blood flow, and behavior.

What it forces us to ask:
What neurophysiological pattern accompanies this state? What changes during transitions between modes? How do brain and body reorganize when moving from rigidity into greater flexibility?

Experimental strength:
Brainlly helps transform subjective experience and behavioral change into hypotheses about neural timing, neurovascular coupling, and state transition. It is the right lens when the question requires tracking the organism in motion, in transition, or in fine variation.

Typical variables:
EEG, fNIRS, SpO₂, pupil, reaction time, trial-by-trial variability.

Decolonial value:
It prevents behavior from being treated only as report or only as average. It forces attention to the organism’s living neurodynamics, not only to a frozen slice.

2) Iam — Affect, motivation, and first-person consciousness

Scientific function: a lens for investigating how affects, bonds, motivations, emotions, and feelings modulate perception, memory, decision, and regulation.

What it forces us to ask:
What regulates or dysregulates this body? What brief emotion is sustaining a more stable feeling? How does subjective value alter the way a person perceives, remembers, and chooses?

Experimental strength:
Iam prevents the experiment from treating the participant as a neutral response machine. It forces the inclusion of the first person as a legitimate dimension of the phenomenon, but in a measurable and comparable way.

Typical variables:
HRV, GSR, respiration, microexpressions, brief scales, state self-reports.

Decolonial value:
It places affective life back at the center without abandoning evidence-based science. It returns the question to the body that lives and feels.

3) Olmeca — Culture, life history, and the social connectome

Scientific function: a lens for investigating how culture, language, schooling, biography, class, symbolic territory, and social development modulate brain and behavior.

What it forces us to ask:
What part of this result depends on culture and trajectory? What does the same stimulus mean for different people? Is the dataset capturing the phenomenon, or a social history that was never modeled?

Experimental strength:
Olmeca prevents sociocultural differences from being treated merely as noise or a footnote covariate. It forces the inclusion of life history, linguistic context, and social territory as material parts of the design.

Typical variables:
Short interviews, narrative analysis, cross-cultural design, linguistic context, schooling, sociocultural variables.

Decolonial value:
It resists fragile universalizations and speaks directly to the problem of generalization and the critique of WEIRD bias already mentioned in the source document.

4) Yagé — Mode shifting and applied metacognition

Scientific function: a lens for investigating the flexibilization of constructs, attentional mode change, and transitions among automatism, rigidity, and critical reorganization.

What it forces us to ask:
Can the person observe their own perception? Can they flexibilize a rigid mode? At what point do they stop repeating a script and begin reorganizing their own reading of the situation?

Experimental strength:
Yagé is especially useful in reversal, reappraisal, strategy-shift, and metacognitive tasks. It helps investigate movement between Zones 1, 2, and 3 as an experimental process, not only as metaphor.

Typical variables:
Error and adaptation, metacognitive measures, EEG/fNIRS during transitions, reversal and reinterpretation paradigms.

Decolonial value:
It opens space for investigating real criticality, not only performance under already-given rules.

5) APUS — Body-Territory and extended proprioception

Scientific function: a lens for investigating how posture, gravity, space, rhythm, environment, and territorial organization enter the body and modulate focus, emotion, memory, and decision.

What it forces us to ask:
What environmental factor reorganizes the body? How does territory alter perception, focus, and choice? What changes when the body is in a different space, route, or relational density?

Experimental strength:
APUS shifts the experiment from the isolated brain to the situated organism. It requires environment, movement, position, and body-space relations to stop being background and become observable parts of the phenomenon.

Typical variables:
IMU, posture, respiration, HRV, route maps, navigation, ecological context measures.

Decolonial value:
It reconnects cognition and territory, preventing human experience from being treated as abstraction without ground.

6) Jiwasa — Synchrony, desynchrony, and collective dynamics

Scientific function: a lens for investigating coordination, conflict, cohesion, affective contagion, social timing, and coupling between people in a shared task.

What it forces us to ask:
Is there real synchrony or alignment under pressure? Is the group in living cooperation or collective capture? Where does cohesion appear, and where does mere repetition appear?

Experimental strength:
Jiwasa is the ideal lens for hyperscanning, turn-taking, leadership, social coordination, physiological synchrony, and comparisons between cooperation and group submission.

Typical variables:
Hyperscanning EEG/fNIRS, synchronized HRV and respiration, speech analysis, group temporal dynamics, collective error.

Decolonial value:
It restores the “we” as a legitimate unit of investigation without erasing the singularity of participants.

7) Math/Hep — Evidence-based science, relation, causality, and the Tensional Self as the unit of analysis

Scientific function: transforming theoretical intuition into testable hypothesis, distinguishing description, correlation, prediction, and causality, and defining clearly which tensional self is being measured.

This point is crucial. If research wants to make serious inferences about “the same tensional self,” it cannot treat the self as a vague entity. It must define it operationally.

Proposed operational definition:
Tensional self = a relatively stable configuration of neurophysiological, bodily, and behavioral couplings that sustains a recurring mode of perceiving, acting, and regulating within a given class of context.

This formulation matters because it preserves the possibility of statistical inference. It does not treat the “same self” as a fixed essence, but as a class of functional configuration with criteria of membership.

What it forces us to ask:
Which tensional self am I measuring? Which physiological, behavioral, and contextual markers define its recurrence? What criterion allows us to say that two episodes belong to the same tensional self? What manipulation can shift it? What control prevents confusion between task, acute emotion, and recurring tensional pattern?

Experimental strength:
Math/Hep organizes experimental design, bias control, replicability, inference, and clear definition of the unit of analysis. Without it, research risks speaking about the tensional self without knowing exactly what it is comparing.

Methodological rule:
One testable hypothesis at a time, with the unit of analysis clearly defined.

Decolonial value:
It protects against excess metaphor, excess correlation, and excess untested certainty. It forces research to measure recurrent observable configurations, not loose labels.

8) DANA — DNA intelligence and living organization in territory

Scientific function: a lens for investigating biological stability, rhythms, long-term regulation, and the relationship between environment, biological belonging, and the sustaining of creativity and functional stability.

What it forces us to ask:
What conditions sustain stability, regulation, and creativity over time? What biological basis supports the maintenance of more organized states? How do environment and belonging modulate living stability?

Experimental strength:
DANA is especially useful when the question requires observing state maintenance, rhythm, sleep, regulation, and longitudinal support, rather than only acute response to a short task.

Typical variables:
Longitudinal physiological markers, rhythms, sleep, autonomic regulation, environmental variables, and stability patterns.

Decolonial value:
It reconnects life, regulation, and biological belonging without reducing everything to acute events, isolated moments, or short tasks.

What the avatars offer to OHBM 2026

Seen in this way, the avatars cease to look like elements of parallel communication and begin to function as operational concepts for research. Each one highlights a dimension frequently reduced in traditional neuroscience: living neurodynamics, first-person affect, culture and biography, mode shifting, body-territory, collective synchrony, causality, and living organization. The point is not to replace classical concepts, but to force richer questions, more sensitive experimental designs, and more honest readings of data.

For OHBM 2026, this creates a very clear invitation: to use these lenses to generate new decolonial questions and experiments with science and evidence, especially in themes that the congress itself is already opening up — naturalistic environments, language, multimodality, EEG, synchrony, development, sleep, memory, creativity, AI, and data sharing.

Because perhaps Latin America’s next strong contribution to neuroscience will not be only to bring new participants into already-ready protocols. Perhaps it will be to help the international community ask better:

• what changes when the body enters as a real variable;

• what changes when territory stops being background;

• what changes when culture and language stop being treated as noise;

• what changes when the “we” also becomes a legitimate unit of investigation;

• and what changes when inference must state clearly which tensional self is being measured.

It is at this point that the avatars may cease to be only a conceptual proposal and begin to function as what matters most for serious researchers: a practical agenda for new questions, new experimental designs, and new forms of evidence.