From the Neuron to the Biome - At What Scale Does Well-Being Begin?

When Words Begin to Trap Us

BrainLatam Special Series — SBNeC 2026

Perhaps our title begins too late.

Before the neuron, there was an egg cell.

A zygote begins a trajectory of divisions and differentiations from which specialized tissues will emerge, including those that will form the nervous system. Contemporary biology continues to show how cellular identities are progressively built through transcriptional and epigenetic changes across development.

There is still no one saying:

“I.”

No autobiographical memory.

No Jiwasa.

But a history has already begun.

And perhaps we can begin our investigation together exactly there:

No brain began as a brain.

We isolate in order to learn

Now let us move forward.

Egg cell.

Embryo.

Tissues.

Nervous system.

Neurons and glia.

Networks.

Organism.

Science can stop its lens at any point.

We can study a synapse.

Metabolism.

Heart rate.

A behavior.

A report of well-being.

This is the cut.

And we need it.

To isolate does not mean to destroy the phenomenon. It means selecting which property, relationship, or scale we want to make observable.

The problem begins when what we isolated in order to know is treated as if it existed alone while we live.

We isolate in order to learn, not in order to Be.

That is why we can work through five movements:

contextualize → isolate → measure → test → reintegrate.

Every cut increases precision.

And loses part of the context.

When does a condition begin to be felt?

Here another distinction appears.

A cell can respond to its environment.

An organism regulates temperature, pressure, glucose, and many other variables.

But biological regulation and conscious experience are not the same thing.

In what BrainLatam calls the Damasian Mind — our own formulation inspired by the neurobiology of António and Hanna Damasio — we are especially interested in the passage through which bodily states begin to participate continuously in felt experience.

In 2024, António and Hanna Damasio proposed that a conscious mind depends on the continuous generation of interoceptive feelings about the organism, the production of images from that organism’s sensory perspective, and the integration of these processes into subjectivity.

This separates two questions that we may have been mixing:

At what scale do the conditions for well-being emerge?

and:

At what scale do those conditions begin to be felt as well-being?

The first may take us all the way to the Biome.

The second brings us back to the living body.

The organism regulates itself, but not in a vacuum

Here we add a BrainLatam hypothesis:

The Body-Territory needs space and movement in order to signal and regulate itself.

“Space,” however, does not need to mean only square meters.

There can be:

physical space to move;

temporal space to stop and recover;

relational space to approach, withdraw, and signal;

territorial space to walk, breathe, find food, water, and other people.

Breathing is movement.

Changing posture is movement.

Walking is movement.

Approaching and withdrawing are movements too.

These actions modify proprioceptive, interoceptive, cardiovascular, and sensory information available to the organism.

We are not saying that every difficulty in regulation results from “lack of movement,” nor that emotions are literally stored somewhere waiting to be released.

The hypothesis is simpler:

a living organism needs possibilities for variation in order to respond to the changes it encounters.

Recent social neuroscience is moving precisely in this direction: beyond measuring only brains, toward simultaneous measurements of body, movement, and environment in more natural interactions.

The brain that arrives in the laboratory has already lived

Now let us pull the lens back.

In 2025, Joaquín Migeot, Agustín Ibáñez, Sol Fittipaldi, Claudia Duran-Aniotz, and a large Latin American collaboration studied 2,211 participants from six countries.

Their model included a social exposome:

education;

food insecurity;

financial resources;

access to healthcare;

childhood experiences;

traumatic events;

conditions accumulated across life.

These factors were associated with cognition and functioning and, in groups with dementia, also with structural and functional brain characteristics.

This does not demonstrate:

territory → neuron, directly.

There are many arrows in between.

But it shows why we should not treat the brain as if it arrived alone in the laboratory.

We call this historical and situated organism the Body-Territory.

And then I meet you

Now another scale appears.

Jiwasa.

In Aymara, recent work by Saúl Bermejo-Paredes and Yanet Maquera-Maquera allows us to think about an inclusive and relational “we.” BrainLatam uses Jiwasa as a window, not as a translation of cooperation or a collective brain.

The question changes.

Not only:

“What do I need in order to regulate myself?”

But:

“What kind of space do our relationships leave so that each Body-Territory can signal, vary, and continue participating?”

In 2025, Ivo Leiva-Cisterna, Paulo Barraza, Eugenio Rodríguez, and Guillaume Dumas went beyond correlation: they experimentally manipulated inter-brain synchrony in dyads and found changes in cooperative coordination.

This does not demonstrate Jiwasa.

But it does show that some properties of action appear in the relationship.

The we does not eliminate the I.

The we reorganizes what each I is able to do.

And who produces the space available to us?

Now we pull the lens back again.

A municipality shapes part of our everyday space.

Where can we walk?

How long do we spend commuting?

Are there trees?

Public squares?

Noise?

Places to meet?

In 2024, Adriano Bressane and colleagues at UNESP found associations between different dimensions of contact with urban green spaces — such as frequency, duration, intensity, naturalness, and infrastructure — and measures of mental well-being in Brazilian metropolitan areas.

This does not mean:

tree → happiness.

It means we can investigate a sequence:

municipality
→ available space
→ possibilities for movement and encounter
→ behavior
→ physiology
→ experience.

Every arrow still requires evidence.

The State can reach breathing

In the Amazon, we find an even more concrete chain.

Paula Prist and colleagues analyzed Indigenous territory protection, forest cover, PM2.5 concentrations, and cardiovascular and respiratory effects.

The study estimated important health benefits associated with protecting these territories and maintaining forest cover.

Now we can follow:

State / rules
→ territorial protection
→ forest
→ atmospheric particles
→ exposure
→ physiology.

A law does not breathe.

A forest does not have my lungs.

PM2.5 does not feel distress.

But a decision at one scale can alter conditions at another.

Science begins when we can demonstrate the arrows.

Materiality, information, and sentience

The Brazilian philosopher Alfredo Pereira Jr., from UNESP, offers another lens.

In Triple-Aspect Monism, he proposes distinguishing three fundamental aspects for understanding conscious experience:

the materiality of the living body;

dynamic patterns of information;

sentience — the capacity to feel.

BrainLatam does not claim that a State or a Biome necessarily possesses these three aspects in the same way as human consciousness.

We use the idea as a tool for asking, at each point in the spiral:

What changed materially?

What information, signal, or relationship mediated the change?

At some point, did it become felt?

Then we ask:

causality?

mediation?

correlation?

hypothesis?

analogy?

The spiral does not authorize a leap.

It makes the leap visible.

From the Biome back to the egg — and to death

Ailton Krenak, in Futuro ancestral (2022), questions our rigid separation between human existence, rivers, and territory.

Antônio Bispo dos Santos, in A terra dá, a terra quer (2023), offers confluence as a window for thinking about relationships among ways of life, land, and other living beings.

They are not offering biomarkers.

They are asking an earlier question:

Why did we decide that well-being ended at the skin?

We can now see our spiral:

egg cell
→ differentiation
→ nervous system
→ organism
→ Damasian Mind
→ Body-Territory
→ Jiwasa
→ municipality
→ State
→ Biome.

And return:

Biome
→ material conditions
→ rules
→ lived space
→ relationships
→ movement and signaling
→ bodily regulation
→ felt experience.

Until that Body-Territory dies.

Its effects may remain in other people, words, institutions, and the territory.

But continuity of effects does not demonstrate continuity of conscious experience.

Our first-person Science follows that organism:

from egg to death.

And it may isolate any point along the way.

It should simply not forget the history of what it isolated.

BrainLatam Question

When we say together that we are “well,” can we discover which conditions began in the Biome, which passed through the State and the territory, which opened or closed our space for movement and relationship — and which actually traveled through the entire spiral until they became lived experience for us?

References — post-2021

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras.

Santos, A. B. dos (2023). A terra dá, a terra quer. Ubu Editora / Piseagrama.

Pereira Jr., A.; Aguiar, V. J. de (2023). Fundamentos e aplicações da Sentiômica: a ciência da capacidade de sentir. Trans/Form/Ação, 46, 57–86.

Prist, P. R.; Sangermano, F.; Bailey, A. et al. (2023). Protecting Brazilian Amazon Indigenous territories reduces atmospheric particulates and avoids associated health impacts and costs. Communications Earth & Environment, 4, 34.

Damasio, A.; Damasio, H. (2024). Homeostatic Feelings and the Emergence of Consciousness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(8), 1653–1659. The expression Damasian Mind is a BrainLatam formulation.

Bressane, A.; Pinto, J. P. C.; Goulart, A. P. G.; Medeiros, L. C. C. (2024). Which dimensions of nature contact in Urban Green Spaces most significantly contribute to mental wellbeing? Health & Place, 89, 103335.

Grasso-Cladera, A.; Costa-Cordella, S.; Mattoli-Sánchez, J.; Parada, F. J. et al. (2025). Embodied hyperscanning for studying social interaction. Social Neuroscience, 20(3), 163–179.

Leiva-Cisterna, I.; Barraza, P.; Rodríguez, E.; Dumas, G. (2025). Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 20(1), nsaf104.

Bermejo-Paredes, S.; Maquera-Maquera, Y. A. (2025). Lenguaje, comprensión del ser y transformación del sistema sexo-género en indígenas aimara del sur peruano. Perfiles Educativos, 47.

Migeot, J.; Pina-Escudero, S. D.; Hernández, H.; Fittipaldi, S.; Duran-Aniotz, C.; Ibáñez, A. et al. (2025). Social exposome and brain health outcomes of dementia across Latin America. Nature Communications, 16, 8196.

“We begin with the egg because no brain began as a brain; we isolate in order to understand life, without forgetting that none of the isolated parts ever lived alone.”