The Body That Learns Territory Before Language
The Body That Learns Territory Before Language
FESBE 2026, DOHaD, Epigenetics, and the Development of Tensional Selves
Before words, there is the body. Before opinion, there is breathing. Before identity, there is an organism learning temperature, hunger, touch, threat, rhythm, light, sleep, food, voice, and territory. We begin this blog by returning to the chest, the abdomen, the feet, and the environment. Because perhaps the first “self” is not an idea. Perhaps it is regulation.
The preliminary program of FESBE 2026 opens a fertile field for this discussion: melatonin and biological rhythms, gut microbiota, developmental programming, epigenetics, DOHaD, perinatal factors, placenta, microplastics at the maternal-fetal interface, parental nutrition, and neurodevelopmental origins of mental disorders. These themes appear across courses, symposia, and conferences related to physiology, public health, neurobiology, and development.
The DOHaD hypothesis — Developmental Origins of Health and Disease — proposes that early-life experiences, especially during fetal, perinatal, and early childhood periods, influence future risks related to health, metabolism, development, and disease. Recent evidence reinforces that nutrition, stress, inflammation, environmental toxins, and maternal context can act through epigenetic pathways, modulating fetal development and long-term vulnerability.
In the BrainLatam2026 framework, this allows us to say: the body learns territory before language. A baby is not born merely with a brain waiting to be educated. The baby is born from a body already crossed by rhythms, molecules, food, emotions, pollution, rest, fear, care, and inequality. Epigenetics should not be understood as destiny, but as biological sensitivity to environment. It shows that territory communicates with DNA without needing to become language first.
This is where DANA, Tekoha, and APUS emerge. DANA represents the living intelligence of DNA regulated by rhythms, environment, and biological belonging. APUS represents territory entering through bodily positioning: posture, gravity, movement, rhythm, and spatial organization. Tekoha expands this inwardly: territory entering as extended interoception — safety, anxiety, hunger, comfort, oppression, warmth, or threat. Within the BrainLatam2026 avatar system, DANA connects directly with APUS and Jiwasa, while APUS interprets how environment reorganizes body, attention, emotion, and decision-making.
The “tensional self” begins to make sense at this point. Before a child says “I am,” the body has already learned patterns of tension. It has already learned whether it needs to defend itself, wait, relax, adapt, ask, remain silent, imitate, or react. This does not reduce human beings to biology. On the contrary, it shows that biology, culture, territory, and care form a single ecology of development.
FESBE 2026 also creates an important bridge with researchers from Brazil and Latin America. Themes such as parental nutrition, critical developmental windows, early-life programming of health, life-course cohort studies, and neurodevelopmental origins of mental disorders demonstrate that Brazilian science is discussing human development with materiality, methodology, and public health relevance.
This is where Decolonial Neuroscience must enter carefully. Many developmental studies still begin from abstract universal models. But a pregnancy in an Indigenous territory, in an urban periphery, under food insecurity, under environmental racism, or within a strong communal network are not the same “environment.” The fetal body does not learn isolated molecules alone. It learns an ecology.
Therefore, Blog 1 may defend a central thesis:
The oldest memories of the body are not narrative memories. They are regulatory patterns.
Before verbal memory, there is respiratory memory. Before belief, there is autonomic rhythm. Before “having to become,” there is a body trying to belong. Later in life, cognitive and motor memories become recruited for doing: working, obeying, performing, representing family, sustaining professions, defending ideologies. But the bodily foundation was already there, as primordial Tekoha and APUS.
A BrainLatam2026 experimental proposal could emerge from this perspective: following children and adolescents across different Latin American territories while measuring sleep, breathing, HRV/RMSSD, nutrition, stress biomarkers, family reports, school context, and, when appropriate, EEG and fNIRS during attention, bonding, and learning tasks. The goal would not be to “prove” destiny, but to map how different ecologies of care modulate Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3 from early life onward.
EEG and fNIRS enter here with seriousness and methodological coherence. EEG could observe rapid temporal dynamics related to attention, error processing, surprise, and cognitive regulation. fNIRS/NIRS could monitor prefrontal hemodynamic responses during ecological, educational, and social tasks, especially when questions involve development, interaction, and territory. The BrainLatam2026 principle remains the same: we do not use technology because it is visually impressive; we use it because each scientific question requires a specific way of listening to body, brain, environment, and belonging.
This discussion also connects directly with DREX Cidadão. If DOHaD demonstrates that early inequality leaves deep physiological marks, then public policy cannot operate only as late correction. It must become citizen metabolism: food, care, time, safety, bonding, territory, school, and health distributed as minimal energy to the social body. In this perspective, DREX Cidadão is not merely economic policy; it is a proposal to reduce collective Zone 3 and strengthen collective Zone 2 from the beginning of life.
Ultimately, The Body That Learns Territory Before Language invites us to rethink human development without separating biology from belonging. A child does not begin as an abstract individual. A child begins as a body within territory. And if territory becomes ill, the body learns tension. If territory provides care, the body learns possibility. Decolonial Neuroscience begins exactly there: before language, before identity, before ideology — in the living body trying to belong.
Recent References Supporting This Text
Dieckmann et al. (2024) — Review on prenatal stress and epigenetic alterations in humans, including links to child health and neurobehavioral outcomes.
Thomason (2024) — Review on prenatal stress and fetal neurodevelopmental programming, considering maternal psychosocial experiences.
Álvarez-Mejía et al. (2025) — Review on adverse maternal exposures such as stress, infection, malnutrition, and environmental toxins and their epigenetic effects on fetal neurodevelopment.
Abrishamcar et al. (2024) — Study on maternal stress/depression, infant DNA methylation, and biological pathways linked to child health outcomes.
Wu et al. (2024) — Review on associations between maternal psychological distress and structural/functional changes in the fetal brain.
de Assis Araujo et al. (2022) — Brazilian PIPA Project study from Rio de Janeiro investigating prenatal metal exposure and child neurodevelopment.
Seefelder de Assis Araujo et al. (2026) — Brazilian cohort study with 393 children from the PIPA Project investigating toxic metal exposure during pregnancy and developmental outcomes between 12–18 months.
CDC (2025) — Updated explanation of epigenetics as environmentally influenced changes in gene expression without altering DNA sequence.
