The Brain in Daily Life -  Equine-assisted riding, sport and embodied enjoyment

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

The Feeling and Knowing Taá — opening a crack for decolonization

I imagine myself on horseback, in a slow walk.
At first my body is stiff: tense hands, raised shoulders, high breathing.
After a few minutes, something gives way:

• the hips start drawing circles,
  
  

• the spine follows the sway,
  
  

• the breath drops down into the abdomen,
  
  

• the gaze stops “watching” and starts actually seeing.
  
  

With no equation at all, I feel that I am thinking differently once the body enters this rhythm shared with the animal.
Taá manifests as this silent knowing:
“something in me reorganized just because I let my body sway together with another living being.”

At the same time, I notice how even this experience can be colonized:
very often medical discourse talks about equine-assisted riding only as a therapeutic resource to correct motor deficits,
reducing the horse to an instrument,
the body to a defective machine,
the walk to a protocol.

I also notice that my own words carry this heritage: a language that tries to fit living experience into categories of normal/abnormal, productive/unproductive.
That is where I need to stop and feel before I repeat the inherited language.

When Taá manifests more clearly, I realize there is no clean separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory):
the way we describe this riding body is at the same time a scientific act, a political gesture and a spiritual choice about what kind of human we are willing to recognize.

What colonizes is not only history: it is the word that stops us from perceiving the body as a territory in relation to other territories — horse, ground, wind.

Every study on equine-assisted riding can be just one more clinical number…
or it can be a small crack of freedom, if we dare to read there the rupture of Zone 3:
the body ceasing to be a “case” and returning to being a Body-Territory in enjoyment.

The study in focus: equine-assisted riding and the brain in motion

Several recent fNIRS and EEG studies have investigated what happens in the brain when a person:

• rides a horse at a regular walking pace,
  
  

• walks alongside the animal,
  
  

• or performs sports exercises on the ground with similar balance and coordination demands.
  
  

These studies compare:

• equine-assisted riding (or hippotherapy) vs. treadmill walking,
  
  

• exercises on a mechanical horse vs. a living horse,
  
  

• sports situations in real environments vs. controlled laboratory conditions.
  
  

The question is simple and profound:

What do the horse and sports movement do with my cognitive–motor organization that no test done sitting in a chair can show?

Methods: fNIRS, movement and real everyday life

Protocols usually combine:

• fNIRS over prefrontal and motor regions,
  
  

• movement sensors (accelerometers, gyroscopes) to record gait patterns,
  
  

• sometimes cardiac and respiratory measures.
  
  

In the analysis, the familiar elements of our technical pattern appear:

• GLM (General Linear Model) to model hemodynamic responses in each condition (mounted, walking, standing),
  
  

• consideration of each participant’s real HRF (Hemodynamic Response Function),
  
  

• use of short-channels to separate superficial signals (skin, extracortical vessels) from cortical signal,
  
  

• application of ICA/PCA to remove systemic noise (breathing, heartbeat, muscle vibration) and identify stable global patterns.
  
  

In some complementary studies, fNIRS is combined with EEG:
then FFT and spectral analysis of alpha/beta bands during the task come in,
allowing us to see how hemodynamics and electrical oscillations couple during movement.

All this not inside an MRI tube,
but in arenas, rehabilitation centers, sports tracks:
the brain measured where life actually happens.

Main results: more than just “prefrontal activation”

Overall, the results converge on a few points:

• Equine-assisted riding and sports that demand dynamic balance tend to increase prefrontal hemodynamic modulation, especially in areas related to executive control and dual attention (thinking while the body moves).
  
  

• There is strong integration between motor and prefrontal areas:
  the brain does not treat movement as something “automatic,” but as an integrated cognitive–motor task.
  
  

• In many participants, especially after injuries or motor disorders, researchers observe:
  
  

• improved postural stability,
  
  

• reduction of excessive co-contractions,
  
  

• increased subjective sense of control and bodily confidence.
  
  

Even more interesting:
the horse-induced gait, with its natural microvariations, seems to favor activation patterns that do not appear in the same way with mechanical simulators or perfectly regular treadmills.

Reading with our concepts

Body-Territory and Jiwasa with another living being

When a person mounts a horse, it is not just “therapy”:
there is a Jiwasa between human and another living being —
a singular inclusive pronoun where “I” and “you” form a we that moves together.

The Body-Territory is necessarily expanded here:
my postural axis now includes the horse’s back,
my proprioception extends all the way to the contact of hooves with the ground.

Damasian Mind in motion

The Damasian Mind is not just the brain representing a still body:
it is the whole body mapping itself in the act of balancing, breathing, anticipating, trusting.

fNIRS captures hemodynamic fragments of this dance:

• the prefrontal cortex adjusting expectation,
  
  

• motor areas negotiating each small imbalance,
  
  

• the autonomic system regulating heartbeat and breathing.
  
  

Tensional Selves and embodied Zone 2

In equine-assisted riding and sports of enjoyment,
we clearly see the transition between:

• Tensional Selves of rigid fear (Zone 3): stiff body, hypercontrol, anxiety about falling;
  
  

• Tensional Selves of automatism (Zone 1): repeating exercises without presence;
  
  

until we reach Zone 2,
where the body trusts, rhythm fits,
and movement becomes enjoyment — not a test.

It is in this Zone 2 that rehabilitation stops being “function training” and becomes the reconstruction of belonging to one’s own body.

Reference Avatars for this cut

In this theme, I naturally reference two of our Reference Avatars:

• Apus, who sees the world through extended proprioception — perfect for understanding how the body–horse–earth axis reorganizes self-perception;
  
  

• Yãy hã mĩy (originally, the Maxakali concept of imitating the animal one intends to hunt),
  here in our extended sense:
  imitating the rhythm of another living being in order to transcend one’s own way of being.
  
  

Riding a horse is an everyday Yãy hã mĩy:
I let myself be moved by another body in order to relearn my own way of existing.

Latin American art as a mirror

When I think of this body that relearns how to walk while mounted,
I remember so many Latin American voices that sing walking as resistance.

Atahualpa Yupanqui repeating “caminar, caminar,”
as if saying that going forward is a lifetime’s work;
or Zé Ramalho in his “inner ship,”
where the body is also a vessel,
crossing visible and invisible landscapes.

These works are, in a way,
the poetic version of what fNIRS and EEG are trying to show:
that moving the body also moves inner worlds.

Where science adjusts our ideas

Before, I might have thought of rehabilitation and sport as:

• something “extra” to treatment,
  
  

• a luxury,
  
  

• or just a way to burn energy.
  
  

These studies show that:

• everyday life in motion is a living laboratory of cortical reorganization;
  
  

• equine-assisted riding is not just a mechanical strategy — it is a way to rewrite maps of Body-Territory;
  
  

• sport lived in Zone 2 is a technology of consciousness just as much as any neuroimaging apparatus.
  
  

Evidence-based science, read in a decolonial way,
refuses the idea that the brain can only be understood in the laboratory.
It gives us back the right to say:
my brain is also what I do with my body in daily life.

Implications for education, health and policy in Latin America

Public health

• Equine-assisted riding and enjoyment-based sports should be seen as part of rehabilitation policy, not as an “optional extra.”
  
  

Education

• School programs that integrate sport, dance, body games and, when possible, contact with animals,
  help form young people who know their own bodily Zone 2.
  
  

Urban policy

• Cities that expel the body from public space — no squares, no parks, no places of enjoyment —
  produce brains chronically in Zone 3.
  
  

Decolonial Neuroscience

• Bringing everyday life, the moving body, and dialogue with traditional knowledges into the center of research —
  knowledges that, for centuries, have understood that horse, land and human form a single field of existence.
  
  

Scientific search keywords

“equine-assisted therapy fNIRS prefrontal gait rehabilitation everyday sport cortical activation GLM short-channels HRF ICA PCA hippotherapy neurorehabilitation”

If we want an inclusive Latin America, we need to take seriously what the body shows us when it rides, runs, dances or simply walks:
it is not “just” movement — it is first-person consciousness writing science with steps, sways and breaths.

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

#Decolonial
#Neuroscience
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#Jiwasa
#Taa
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