OHBM 2026: Lifespan Development — how does the territory in which a child grows up enter the brain?
OHBM 2026: Lifespan Development — how does the territory in which a child grows up enter the brain?
OHBM 2026 placed a highly valuable theme on the table: Lifespan Development. Within this session, topics include The link between gender inequality and brain structure across the lifespan and the world and Macroscale connectome gradient development in infants with and without prenatal substance exposure. That alone already signals an important shift: brain development is not being treated only as a closed biological sequence. The program itself opens space to think about inequality, exposure, and life context as part of how the brain is formed.
This is highly relevant for a Decolonial Neuroscience reading. For a long time, science tried to explain development as if the brain grew almost by itself, with the environment appearing only as a secondary detail. But in real life, nobody grows outside of territory. Every child grows somewhere, within some network of care, within some affective atmosphere, within some degree of protection or threat, within some regime of language, sleep, nutrition, fear, or welcome.
In Brain Bee language, the question can become:
Does the brain grow only through genes, or also through the kind of world in which a child lives?
This is a strong question because it brings neuroscience closer to concrete experience. Adolescents understand this quickly. Everyone can sense, even without talking about connectomes, that growing up in a caring environment is not the same as growing up under constant tension. The point of OHBM 2026 is that this now appears more explicitly within the scientific agenda itself.
Here, the avatars that help most are Tekoha, Olmeca, and APUS.
Tekoha reminds us that development is not just internal maturation. It is a body living in territory, metabolizing routine, climate, care, noise, insecurity, bonding, and social landscape.
Olmeca helps prevent the erasure of culture, inequality, history, and Latin American context. When OHBM includes a topic such as gender inequality and brain structure across the lifespan and the world, it opens an important window: the brain also carries marks of social organization, not only of biological inheritance.
APUS enters because development is also body in space, posture, rhythm, proximity, a sense of safety, and the possibility of exploring the world without freezing.
The decolonial critique here does not need to be aggressive. It can be simple: many developmental theories remain crystallized when they treat context as a “confounding variable” rather than as a material part of the phenomenon itself. A child does not receive the world only after the brain is ready. The world enters while the brain is still being organized.
A better question, then, would be this:
How do care, inequality, and exposure enter the development of attention, language, emotion, and bodily confidence?
This is a good question for OHBM 2026, a good question for Brain Bee, and an excellent question for Latin America. Here, we know in practice that territory is not just a beautiful background landscape. Territory is what organizes or disorganizes life.
A Brain Bee proposal for an EEG + NIRS experiment
The proposal can be simple: compare adolescents from school contexts with more cooperative and predictable routines to adolescents exposed to more tense or disorganized environments, using short tasks involving attention, error, and feedback.
With EEG, we can observe markers of error monitoring, attention, and updating. With NIRS, we can follow frontal regulation during challenge tasks. The goal is not to “label” groups, but to see how different histories of environment may appear in the way people sustain attention, deal with errors, and recover stability.
The central hypothesis is direct: development is not only brain growth; it is also the incorporation of lived territory. If this appears in EEG and NIRS, we move closer to a neuroscience that is more honest about Latin American reality.
Where OHBM 2026 is already pointing in this direction
This blog is not inventing a theme outside the congress. On the contrary, it grows directly out of the program itself. The Lifespan Development session already shows that development across life is being thought about in connection with inequality, functional variability, and prenatal exposure. The broader program also reinforces this movement through symposia on typical and atypical development, fetal imaging, and infant imaging. The key is not to abandon the official terms, but to widen the question: when science speaks about lifespan, is it looking only at age and growth curves, or also at inequality, territory, environment, and belonging?
Why this matters for Latin America
In our region, child and youth development can never be understood outside of context. School, violence, family care, mobility, food, pollution, transport, religiosity, sociability, and access to culture enter the body long before they become spreadsheet variables. That is why a neuroscience built here gains strength when it asks not only “which brain network changed?” but also “what kind of world entered that network?”
This is especially important for young people between 14 and 17 years old. They are already able to understand that biology matters, but they also perceive that not everyone grows up with the same chance to feel safe enough to learn, speak, explore, and make mistakes. If Brain Bee Latam wants to inspire new scientific questions, this is one of the best places to begin.
The beauty of this OHBM 2026 theme is precisely this: it already leaves the door slightly open. Our role is to open it further.
Instead of asking only how the brain develops, we can ask:
What kind of territory helps a child grow with greater confidence?
What kind of environment increases bodily cost, fear, and rigidity?
How does this appear in the brain without erasing culture and inequality?
When neuroscience begins to measure that, it stops being only a science of abstract development and starts becoming a science of situated development.
References used in this blog
OHBM 2026 — Oral Session “Lifespan Development”, including The link between gender inequality and brain structure across the lifespan and the world and Macroscale connectome gradient development in infants with and without prenatal substance exposure.
OHBM 2026 Schedule at a Glance — confirmation that Lifespan Development is scheduled as an oral session in the congress.
OHBM 2026 program overview — presence of symposia and tracks related to typical and atypical development, fetal imaging, and infant approaches, reinforcing that development is a strong axis of the meeting.
