OHBM 2026: Naturalistic environments, memory, sleep and creativity — why does science understand the motionless brain so well and the living brain so poorly?
OHBM 2026: Naturalistic environments, memory, sleep and creativity — why does science understand the motionless brain so well and the living brain so poorly?
OHBM 2026 brings a particularly fertile theme for anyone who wants to think about neuroscience with more body, more real time, and more lived experience. The keynote by Nanthia Suthana highlights human cognition in naturalistic environments, integrating high-density EEG, wearable sensors, first-person video, and real-world behavior. At the same time, the oral program includes the topic Wake-to-sleep transition facilitates novel idea generation based on associative recombination, while the Talairach Lecture by Maiken Nedergaard reinforces the link between sleep, brain clearance, and cognitive health. This combination alone already signals an important shift: memory, creativity, and cognitive health are not being thought about only through static laboratory tasks, but also in relation to environment, state transitions, and lived life.
This has enormous value for a Decolonial Neuroscience reading. For a long time, science accumulated a great deal of knowledge about the motionless brain: seated, still, isolated, responding to controlled stimuli. That brought important advances, of course. But real human life almost never happens that way. We remember while walking, create after drowsiness, regulate through breathing, think better when we change states, make mistakes when overloaded, and reorganize meaning in subtle transitions between attention, fatigue, rest, and imagination.
In Brain Bee language, the question can become:
Do creativity and memory appear more clearly when a person is still in the lab, or when they are living in a more real way?
This is a strong question because it touches an experience that teenagers recognize immediately. Many people have already noticed that good ideas do not appear only when they are trying hard to think. Sometimes they appear after resting, after walking, after changing environment, after the body leaves a rigid state. The point of OHBM 2026 is that this now appears more clearly in the scientific agenda itself, as the program brings together naturalistic environments, wake-to-sleep transition, memory, and cognitive health.
Here, the avatars that help most are APUS, DANA, and Brainlly.
APUS matters because thinking, remembering, and creating are never only internal brain operations. They also involve body in space, navigation, rhythm, pause, movement, orientation, and a sense of openness or confinement. When science moves beyond the motionless brain and enters naturalistic environments, APUS helps remind us that cognition happens in body-territory.
DANA matters because sleep, restoration, metabolism, and system stability matter deeply. Maiken Nedergaard’s Talairach Lecture is especially relevant here because it connects sleep, the glymphatic system, and the maintenance of cognitive health. This helps move beyond the idea that rest is merely “switching off.” In many cases, rest is a reorganization of the biological conditions that make memory, clarity, and creativity possible.
Brainlly matters because this is clearly a theme tied to fine observation of state transitions. If OHBM is talking about wake-to-sleep transition, real-world behavior, and EEG integrated with wearable sensing, then we need a lens capable of following dynamics, variation, and mode shifts, not only static averages.
The decolonial critique here can be simple: much theory still becomes crystallized when it treats cognition as if it appeared best only under conditions of immobility and maximum control. But perhaps life itself is telling us something else. Perhaps some important forms of memory and creativity only emerge when the body can leave rigidity, shift state, and reorganize itself in relation to the environment. OHBM 2026 itself suggests this by bringing the study of cognition in naturalistic environments closer to themes such as wake-sleep transition and cognitive health.
A better question, then, would be this:
What changes in memory and creativity when the body leaves fixed mode and enters a more alive state of transition, rest, or exploration?
That is a good question for OHBM 2026, a good question for Brain Bee, and a very important question for Latin America. Because here too we need a neuroscience that does not treat living as noise, but as part of the phenomenon itself.
A Brain Bee proposal for an EEG + NIRS experiment
The proposal can be simple and very rich: compare participants before and after a short nap, before and after a light walk, or after a simple ecological navigation task, followed by an associative memory task and a creative-generation task.
With portable EEG + NIRS, we can track changes in attention, effort, and regulation across these transitions. The goal would not be to prove that “rest solves everything,” but to observe how certain bodily states favor memory reorganization and the emergence of new ideas. The central hypothesis is direct: part of creativity and clarity may depend less on forcing the brain and more on allowing the body to shift state well.
Where OHBM 2026 is already pointing in this direction
This blog grows directly out of the official program. Nanthia Suthana’s keynote emphasizes the investigation of human cognition in naturalistic environments, with integration of EEG, wearable sensors, and real-world behavior. The oral program includes Wake-to-sleep transition facilitates novel idea generation based on associative recombination, and the Talairach Lecture by Maiken Nedergaard reinforces the link between sleep and cognitive health. This shifts the question.
Instead of asking only “how does the brain execute a task?”, the discussion can become richer: how do memory, creativity, and cognitive health change when science follows real bodily states in transition?
Why this matters for Latin America
In our region, thinking about cognition in a more ecological and embodied way has real power. Everyday life rarely separates body, environment, memory, and creation. We learn in movement, remember in situation, rest under conditions that are not always ideal, create in the interval, and regulate the mind in relation to territory, climate, noise, routine, and coexistence.
This is especially important for young people between 14 and 17 years old. They already feel in practice that there are days when the mind does not work well because the body is exhausted, and days when an idea appears almost out of nowhere after a change in rhythm. If Brain Bee Latam wants to inspire new scientific questions, this is a very powerful terrain.
The beauty of this OHBM 2026 theme is exactly this: it already opens space to move beyond the motionless brain and into the living brain.
Instead of asking only how memory works in a static task, we can ask:
What changes after a short nap?
How does walking or exploring the environment change attention and creation?
Could part of intelligence appear more clearly when the body is allowed to shift states?
When neuroscience begins to measure that, it stops being only a science of controlled execution and starts becoming also a science of cognitive life in motion.
References used in this blog
OHBM 2026 — keynote by Nanthia Suthana, highlighting human cognition in naturalistic environments with integration of EEG, wearable sensors, first-person video, and real-world behavior.
OHBM 2026 — oral session “Higher Cognitive Functions”, including the topic Wake-to-sleep transition facilitates novel idea generation based on associative recombination.
OHBM 2026 — Talairach Lecture by Maiken Nedergaard, emphasizing sleep, the glymphatic system, and cognitive health.
