How Much of Your Brain Is Busy Trying to Survive?

When Words Begin to Trap Us

BrainLatam Special Series — SBNeC 2026

The bill is due tomorrow.

The food needs to last until Friday.

The rent is overdue.

A child is sick.

The job may disappear.

The bank just sent another message.

And yet, this person still needs to wake up, care for their children, work, drive, study, decide, smile, vote, and plan for the future.

The question in this text is not how much money this person has.

It comes before that:

How much of the experience of this Body-Territory must remain mobilized simply to make sure it continues to exist tomorrow?

There is no brain region called “financial survival.” Nor can we calculate that someone uses 20%, 40%, or 70% of the brain thinking about money.

“How much of your brain is busy trying to survive?” is a question about the recurrent recruitment of attention, memory, emotion, anticipation, and decision-making.

The brain does not stop functioning under material insecurity.

On the contrary.

It may be working intensely to solve precisely the problem presented by the environment.

Stress is not necessarily a disease

Stress is part of our adaptive capacity.

When something threatens what we consider important, different systems participate in preparing the organism:

attention changes;

breathing may change;

heart rate may change;

memories related to the situation are recruited;

alternatives are compared;

the organism prepares to act.

This is useful.

The problem is not being able to mobilize in the face of a threat.

The question changes when what should have been a temporary mobilization becomes a recurring part of life:

Will I be able to pay?

Will there be enough food?

Could I lose my job?

How will I pay this debt?

What if someone gets sick?

In this case, perhaps we are not dealing only with a “stressed individual.”

We may be dealing with an ecology that demands repeated mobilization for survival.

Latin American research already provides important clues.

In a population-based study conducted in Criciúma, Santa Catarina, with 1,683 adults, approximately 38% showed perceived stress in the periods evaluated. Before the pandemic, food insecurity was associated with a 29% higher prevalence of perceived stress. During the pandemic, that specific association did not appear, reminding us that social and physiological relationships change with context and should not be transformed into universal laws.

Another Brazilian study, conducted in Ouro Preto and Mariana, found a consistent association between food insecurity and symptoms of anxiety and depression during the pandemic. Symptom severity increased alongside the severity of food insecurity.

Material survival, therefore, does not happen outside the mind.

It becomes part of the Body-Territory.

Territory also reaches the brain

This point becomes even more important when we stop trying to find one single variable responsible for suffering.

In 2025, researchers assessed 2,211 people across six Latin American countries using the concept of the social exposome: instead of asking only about current income, they combined education, food insecurity, financial resources, healthcare access, childhood experiences, traumatic events, and other conditions accumulated across life.

Among participants without dementia, more adverse social exposomes were associated with poorer cognitive performance. Particularly important factors included food insecurity, financial resources, perceived socioeconomic position, and access to healthcare. In groups with dementia, associations also appeared with structural and brain-connectivity changes.

In 2026, another study involving 3,941 participants from six Latin American countries found that accumulated social vulnerabilities were associated with different dimensions of brain health. Among cognitively preserved participants, associations appeared especially in memory and executive functions.

These studies do not say:

poverty causes an inferior brain.

That interpretation would be scientifically weak and socially dangerous.

They suggest something far more interesting:

To understand a brain, we also need to know in which ecology that Body-Territory had to learn how to live.

A decision that seems irrational may be rational in that territory

Imagine two people.

One has enough financial reserves to survive for two years without income.

The other has enough money for three days.

We offer both:

R$500 now

or

R$650 in two months.

If they choose differently, we may quickly interpret:

“one has better self-control.”

Perhaps.

But there is another possibility.

For one person, waiting is an abstract decision about return.

For the other, waiting may mean:

not buying food;

not paying electricity;

not buying medicine;

accumulating interest.

In that case, the variable is not only “inside the brain.”

The economic situation changed the real value of the alternatives.

This distinction matters for Neuroscience, and it matters enormously for Politics.

When we observe decisions without observing territory, we may call something a deficit when, in that environment, it is an adaptation.

Body-Territory does not end at the skin

Here we use Body-Territory as a window for investigation.

A person does not arrive at an experiment carrying only their brain.

They arrive with:

sleep;

food;

debts;

history;

language;

work;

children;

fear;

belonging;

expectations;

experiences of violence or safety;

the possibilities they had;

the possibilities they never had.

This is why Decolonial Neuroscience should not mean only placing more Latin Americans into experiments designed elsewhere.

We also need to ask:

Which Latin American variables have not yet entered the scientific question?

Research on occupational stress itself shows how many regional gaps remain. A 2025 review on healthcare professionals in Latin America found enormous heterogeneity across studies and burnout prevalence ranging from 13.2% to 70.3%, while also highlighting how regional knowledge remains concentrated in particular professions and measurement approaches.

Perhaps we need to spend less time asking only:

Who tolerates work better?

and also ask:

What kind of work are we asking this body to tolerate?

Science: how do we do it?

In BrainLatam language:

Science → Doing → Executive.

Science must transform the question into something that can be wrong.

We could follow children from different territories from their earliest years and measure, over time:

food security;

income predictability;

family debt;

sleep quality;

breathing;

HRV;

cortisol;

physical activity;

performance in attention and executive-function tasks;

EEG;

fNIRS;

family relationships;

perceived safety;

time available to play, learn, create, or simply do nothing.

Not to discover the “brain of poverty.”

But to test:

Which pathways connect material security or insecurity to development and experience?

And, above all:

Which of these pathways are modifiable?

Politics: what do we judge to be acceptable?

BrainLatam uses another analogy:

Politics → Opinion / Judgment.

After evidence comes a decision that science alone cannot make.

Even if we demonstrate that material insecurity affects health, attention, or development, we still need to decide:

What level of insecurity do we consider acceptable for a child?

That is not a neuroscientific question.

It is political.

The population needs to have an opinion.

The State needs to decide.

And different models can be tested.

Latin America already provides large-scale social experiments.

In 2022, a quasi-experimental study based on Brazil’s 100 Million Brazilian Cohort found lower suicide rates among Bolsa Família beneficiaries compared with comparable non-beneficiaries. The study does not prove that cash transfer alone “prevents suicide,” and it has observational limitations, but it provides important evidence that economic policies can have measurable health consequences.

In 2024, another Brazilian study followed 69,901 people previously hospitalized for psychiatric disorders and found an association between Bolsa Família receipt and lower overall and natural-cause mortality. For suicide, the result did not reach statistical significance. Again, the scientific answer is not a simple ideological slogan: some effects appear; others do not.

What if we changed the variable from birth?

This is where a BrainLatam hypothesis enters, not a conclusion from the scientific literature.

We call this hypothesis Citizen Drex + Biome Income.

An important distinction is necessary.

The Drex currently being developed by the Central Bank of Brazil is a digital financial infrastructure based on tokenized assets, programmability, and intermediation through authorized institutions. The current Drex Pilot is not the same as the “Citizen Drex” proposed here by BrainLatam.

Our question is counterfactual:

What would happen if every Body-Territory, from birth, had a predictable citizen-based economic foundation, and if part of the value produced by preserving and regenerating the Biome returned directly to the bodies and collectives living in that territory?

We are not asking only:

Would they have more money?

We are asking:

Would the ecology of decisions change?

For example:

material security from childhood
↓
less unpredictability?

↓
changes in family stress?

↓
different sleep?

↓
greater food stability?

↓
a different school experience?

↓
a different relationship with work and debt?

↓
a different capacity to plan?

↓
a different relationship with risk?

↓
different political choices?

Each arrow needs to be tested.

An interesting Brazilian experiment already exists at the municipal level. In Maricá, Rio de Janeiro, researchers evaluated a permanent and unconditional basic income paid in local social currency. The study found a 9% increase in total household income and a 5% increase in household consumption, along with changes in the composition of labor income. No significant effects on depression were found in that study, and some outcomes were ambiguous, showing why basic income should not be treated as a magical solution.

It is precisely this uncertainty that makes the question scientific.

Religion: what can we do with the space that appears?

Our third analogy is:

Religion → Transcending → Legislative.

Here religion does not necessarily mean church or doctrine.

It means the capacity to represent a state that does not yet exist:

“My life could be different.”

When the entire horizon is occupied by:

eating;

paying;

working;

not losing;

surviving,

perhaps some possibilities receive less space to be represented.

We do not yet know whether guaranteed income would produce greater human transcendence.

It would be incorrect to claim that.

The BrainLatam hypothesis is more careful:

Reducing part of the recurrent pressure of survival may increase the availability of time and attention from which different Body-Territories can choose what to do.

Some may create.

Others may study.

Others may care for their children.

Others may pray.

Others may contemplate.

Others may become entrepreneurs.

Others may produce science.

Others may simply rest.

Transcendence would not be the benefit delivered by the State.

It would be a possibility that the State stops preventing through extreme scarcity of time, security, and attention.

From the brain to the Biome — and back

Now we can perform the first BrainLatam spiral in this series:

food insecurity
→ concern
→ physiological mobilization
→ attention
→ decision
→ behavior
→ family
→ work
→ economy
→ politics.

And then return:

economic policy
→ income
→ work
→ territory
→ food
→ sleep
→ physiology
→ brain.

But no arrow is free.

We need to discover the mechanisms.

That is exactly what transforms a worldview into science.

The question is not how much the poor can tolerate

Perhaps we have spent too much time asking:

How can we make people more resistant to scarcity?

Neuroscience can formulate an additional question:

What happens when we modify scarcity itself?

And Latin America may be one of the most important places on the planet to ask this question.

Not because our Body-Territories are biologically exceptional.

But because we live with extraordinary cultural and biological diversity while inequality, informality, food insecurity, environmental wealth, and economic concentration coexist at remarkable scales.

Perhaps the most interesting experiment is not teaching a brain to tolerate ever more pressure.

Perhaps it is investigating which possibilities emerge when it has to represent fewer times:

“How will I survive tomorrow?”

and can begin to ask:

“What do I want to do with the tomorrow I can now imagine?”

BrainLatam Question

How much of what we call individual choice would change if a Body-Territory learned, from birth, that its existence does not continuously depend on transforming more time, more territory, and more life into money?

Recent references with a Latin American focus — post-2021

Machado DB et al. (2022). Relationship between the Bolsa Família national cash transfer programme and suicide incidence in Brazil: A quasi-experimental study. PLOS Medicine.

Food insecurity and symptoms of anxiety and depression disorder during the COVID-19 pandemic (2022). Population-based study conducted in Ouro Preto and Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Household food insecurity before and during COVID-19 pandemic and its association with perceived stress (2023). Cadernos de Saúde Pública. Population-based study conducted in Criciúma, Santa Catarina, Brazil.

Bonfim C et al. (2024). Conditional cash transfers and mortality in people hospitalised with psychiatric disorders: A cohort study of the Brazilian Bolsa Família Programme. PLOS Medicine.

Balakrishnan S, Costa R, Haushofer J, Waltenberg F. (2024). Welfare Effects of a Permanent Unconditional Cash Transfer Program: Evidence from Maricá, Brazil. NBER Working Paper 33089. This should be interpreted as a working paper, not as definitive peer-reviewed evidence.

García-Pérez L, Pino YM, Ansoleaga E. (2025). Prevalence of occupational stress-related syndromes among health care workers in Latin America from 2019 to 2023. Revista Brasileira de Medicina do Trabalho.

Migeot J et al. (2025). Social exposome and brain health outcomes of dementia across Latin America. Nature Communications. Data from six Latin American countries.

Farombi T et al. (2026). Social vulnerability shapes deep clinical phenotypes and brain health in aging and dementia across Latin America. Alzheimer's & Dementia. Study with 3,941 participants from six Latin American countries.

Schwarz NV, Stampini M. (2025). Landscape of Non-contributory Cash Transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean, before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Inter-American Development Bank.