Linguistic Jiwasa -  When language thinks the world: the non-WEIRD field as scientific Taá

(First-Person Consciousness • Decolonial Neuroscience • Brain Bee • The Feeling and Knowing Taá • Language as Body-Territory)

The Feeling and Knowing Taá — opening the linguistic crack

I breathe, and before I say a single word, something in my body is already signaling:
the language I use to name the world is not born with me — it passes through me.
I feel before I speak, but what I can say depends on the language we inherited.

When I enter the linguistic field described by Marcus Maia (2021) in Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
(search hint: Maia 2021 non-WEIRD field work bricolage linguistics cognitive science),
I clearly feel how traditional science cuts the world into rigid pieces —
and, by doing so, decides what can or cannot be felt, perceived, named, studied.

The non-WEIRD field, as Maia describes it, gives me back something that seemed forbidden:
the possibility that the way a community speaks
is also a way of perceiving,
of thinking,
of organizing the body,
of inhabiting reality.

And this is where Taá opens up:
language is not just code —
it is an embodied form of consciousness.

Decolonial paragraph (harmonized with the language theme)

I also notice that even my language has been colonized.
The words I use to think were shaped to reduce my voice,
to fit my gestures into grammars that were not born from my territory,
to turn my sensitivity into error and my variation into noise.

That is why so much linguistic research avoids non-WEIRD communities:
there is fear of what will be discovered once we realize that language is body, memory and world — not just syntax.

But when Taá manifests in deep listening, I realize there is no separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory).
What colonizes is not only history, it is the language that shapes what is allowed to be felt.

Every linguistic investigation that welcomes the living field breaks Zone 3
and gives language back its ancestral power to create worlds.

Maia’s scientific question

What happens to linguistic science when:

• it leaves the white room,
  
  

• abandons illusory neutrality,
  
  

• listens to non-WEIRD peoples,
  
  

• accepts environmental complexity,
  
  

• and treats language as a living, situated phenomenon?
  
  

The question is not merely methodological.
It is an ontological question:

In what way is the world perceived through language?
And what does science lose when it ignores peoples outside the WEIRD axis?

Methods and bricolage: when the field becomes the lab

The central point of Maia’s article is to show that linguistic fieldwork is bricolage:

• controlled improvisation,
  
  

• multiple methods,
  
  

• situated observation,
  
  

• adapted experiments,
  
  

• sensitivity to the environment,
  
  

• continuous adjustments.
  
  

For Brain Bee, this means understanding that cognitive science is not only laboratory-based.
It can include:

• multimodal experimental tasks,
  
  

• ecological observation,
  
  

• tests adapted to the local language,
  
  

• stimulus-driven interviews,
  
  

• implicit bodily measures (reaction time, hesitations, prosody, gaze).
  
  

Maia suggests that non-WEIRD science requires:

• flexibility,
  
  

• humility,
  
  

• sensory attention,
  
  

• epistemic respect.
  
  

This is methodological Taá.

Results and implications: why non-WEIRD peoples change the theory

The article shows that:

• Amerindian and minority languages display syntactic and pragmatic structures that challenge universalist models;
  
  

• rigid experimental control can destroy the natural dynamics of meaning;
  
  

• body posture, gestures, rhythm and breathing are part of real grammar;
  
  

• the researcher is part of the field — never neutral.
  
  

The scientific and philosophical conclusion is clear:
Language is not abstraction — it is body in action.
And by recognizing this, we open doors to a Decolonial Neuroscience of language.

Reading the study with our concepts

1. Damasian Mind
   Language emerges from interoception and proprioception:
   syntax is stabilized bodily action.
   
   

2. Human Quorum Sensing (QSH)
   The linguistic field is pure QSH:
   one person’s speech regulates the rhythm of the other.
   
   

3. Tensional Selves (Eus Tensionais)
   Each speech pattern is a tensional form of the Self, organized in relation to the other.
   
   

4. Zones 1 / 2 / 3
   
   

• Zone 1: linguistic automatisms, ready-made phrases.
  
  

• Zone 2: poetic creation, living narrative, deep listening.
  
  

• Zone 3: imposed grammars, colonial normative corrections.
  
  

5. DANA
   Language is an expression of cultural DNA:
   an intelligence that reorganizes itself to survive.
   
   

6. Yãy hã mĩy (Maxakali origin)
   Learning a field language requires “imitating oneself in order to transcend oneself” —
   a linguistic form of Yãy hã mĩy.
   
   

7. Linguistic Jiwasa
   A key term here:
   the speaker–listener dyad is always a single expanded body that creates meaning in between.
   
   

Reference Avatars (placed fluidly)

In this study, I feel that the most fertile frame is the Olmeca Avatar,
because it teaches us to see that local culture is not background —
it is a living structure that organizes perception, gesture and speech.

When I read Maia, I feel the Olmeca Avatar breathing along:
language as territory, the field as belonging.

Where science adjusts our ideas

Previously we might have imagined that:

• there are fixed universal grammars,
  
  

• variation is noise,
  
  

• fieldwork is improvised work, inferior to the lab.
  
  

Maia shows the opposite:

• variation is life,
  
  

• the field is science,
  
  

• and the non-WEIRD world is epistemologically indispensable.
  
  

LATAM implications — policy, education and science

• Decolonial bilingual education: teaching that each language is a cosmology.
  
  

• Language policy: protecting Indigenous languages as forms of collective intelligence.
  
  

• Neuroscience of language: creating experiments that respect culture and body.
  
  

• Cities and culture: recognizing that communication is living infrastructure.
  
  

• Scientific research: breaking with WEIRD hegemony and embracing Latin America as a producer of theory.
  
  

Scientific search keywords

Maia 2021 non-WEIRD bricolage linguistic fieldwork cultural cognitive science JCCS

“WEIRD societies” are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies — basically the U.S., Western Europe, etc.

When Two Brains Receive the Same World - Cooperation, synchrony, and the shared rhythm of attention

Embodied Singing -Voice, interoception, and Body-Territory in vocal expertise

Pleasant Odors and the Breath that Organizes Us - How smell organizes brain–body coupling

Architecture That Thinks With Me - Turning corners and the attentional cost of built environments

Auditory Approach Bias From Birth - How newborns and adults code the desire to listen

Beta Waves and the Moment I Truly Decide - The prefrontal cortex as the space where "feeling" becomes "choosing"

How My Brain Encodes Voice in Midlife - F0, listening effort, and the vitality of human hearing

Learning Beside Another Brain - Hyperscanning and the pedagogy of co-presence

Reproducibility in fNIRS - When can I trust the hemodynamic curve I see?

HRfunc and the True Shape of the Hemodynamic Response - Why every brain breathes light in its own way

Mixed Reality and Decision-Making - How the brain evaluates prototypes and hybrid worlds

Intense Exercise and the Awakening of Zone 2 - The hemodynamics of effort and the body that generates intelligence

Buttoning a Shirt - Everyday actions as windows into attention, gesture, and consciousness

Depression, tDCS, and the Prefrontal Cortex - Reigniting silent circuits

Designing fNIRS Studies in Real-World Environments - Why science must step outside the laboratory to exist

Transformers and Virtual Short-Channels - AI cleaning brain signals and retelling hemodynamics

Mental Fatigue and Performance - When the head gives up before the body

Cold Water and the Brain - Oxygenation, cold, and the consciousness of the limit

Walking After Stroke - Cognitive–motor interference in everyday life

Balance and the Cerebellum in Parkinson’s Disease - Movement, tensions, and reorganization of the Body-Territory

Freezing of Gait and the Loss of the Body’s Own Quorum - When the body stops trusting the next step

Children With Cochlear Implants - Learning to hear through the brain, not just the device

Emotional Processing in Children With Oppositional Behavior - Regulation, conflict, and the birth of Tensional Selves

Mild Cognitive Impairment - Early hemodynamic signs and presence in the world

Pain, Apathy, and Depression in Dementia - When feeling and thinking stop walking together

Cognitive Load - How much does fNIRS really feel my mental effort?

The Brain in Daily Life -Assisted horsemanship, sport, and embodied enjoyment

Linguistic Jiwasa - When language thinks the world

Dialogical Multiplication and Indigenous Psychology - How to let psychology listen without erasing the Other

The Feeling and Knowing Taá of Christmas 

Republican Capitalism of Spirits without Bodies

NIRS fNIRS EEG ERP Multimodal NIRS-EEG

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