The Transition That Never Arrives -  Fake News, Expectation, and the “72 Hours”

What happens to us when B does not arrive — but we keep living as if it were about to?

Seventy-two hours.

Perhaps I do not even know exactly where that number came from.

Someone I trust sends it to me.

Then someone else repeats it.

I see a video.

Then another.

People are waiting.

Maybe I am not completely sure that something will happen. But something has already begun to happen in me because it might.

Seventy-two hours does not sound like a very long time.

We can wait.

And while we wait, we begin to notice signs.

A statement seems important.

A silence seems even more important.

An ordinary movement begins to look unusual.

A photograph acquires another meaning.

Every new piece of information may seem like one more fragment of something that has not yet become fully visible.

And somewhere along the way, perhaps without noticing exactly when, our question changes.

It is no longer:

“Will B happen?”

It becomes:

“When will B happen?”

B is still in the future.

But it has already begun organizing our present.

And then the 72 hours end

After Brazil's 2022 presidential runoff, messages circulated among some supporters of then-president Jair Bolsonaro claiming that Article 142 of the Brazilian Constitution would authorize or trigger military intervention after 72 hours of protests.

There was no such 72-hour provision. Article 142 does not establish that deadline, and Brazil's Supreme Federal Court later unanimously affirmed that the Armed Forces do not possess a constitutional “moderating power” allowing them to intervene among the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches. (Lupa)

But perhaps we can remain inside the moment for a while before turning it into a lesson about misinformation.

Let us imagine that we waited.

Not as an outside observer looking at someone else's mistake.

We waited.

The expectation happened in a Body-Territory.

Maybe there was anxiety.

Maybe hope.

Maybe prayer.

Maybe belonging.

Perhaps we spent those days speaking with people who were waiting for the same thing.

Then the expected moment arrives.

And B does not.

For an instant, there is something almost naked in front of us:

what we expected and what happened are not the same.

What happens next?

Before there is an explanation, there is a gap

Research on learning uses the expression prediction error for a family of processes involving a mismatch between an expected outcome and the outcome that is actually received. Such mismatches can contribute to learning and to the updating of internal expectations. (ScienceDirect)

But we do not need to begin with the technical expression.

Maybe we can simply remain with the gap.

I expected something.

Something else happened.

For a brief moment, the world has contradicted me.

Perhaps I can say:

“Then I was mistaken.”

But another possibility may arrive almost immediately:

“Maybe we misunderstood the deadline.”

“Something is happening behind the scenes.”

“The plan changed.”

“We need to wait a little longer.”

After the 2022 election, fact-checkers documented how additional conspiracy narratives and supposedly imminent events circulated after earlier expectations failed to materialize. (Lupa)

And perhaps together we begin to see a strange form of transition:

A → expectation of B → B does not happen → another B appears ahead.

B did not disappear.

It moved.

And if B can always move, perhaps the transition never has to end.

But what I felt really happened

This is where something becomes difficult.

If someone tells me that the claim was false, perhaps my Body-Territory hears something else:

“Everything you lived was false.”

Was it?

The anxiety happened.

The hope happened.

The conversations happened.

The sense of belonging happened.

If I prayed, the prayer happened.

If I felt that I was participating in something larger than myself, that experience also happened.

None of this has to be invented for the explanation surrounding it to be factually wrong.

BrainLatam has approached this difference through a simple scene: we see a dark shape near a doorway, the body reacts, and only afterward do we discover that it was a coat.

The fear was not imaginary.

The interpretation of its cause was mistaken.

Feeling is true as experience. It does not automatically prove the explanation we give to what we felt. (brainlatam)

Perhaps this allows us to stay together a little longer.

I do not have to humiliate my own experience in order to revise my interpretation of reality.

Maybe I can keep the experience and release the explanation.

Then the phrase comes back

“72 hours.”

I have heard it before.

Again.

And again.

Something changes when a sentence stops being unfamiliar.

Research on the illusory truth effect shows that repetition can increase perceived truth, on average, including for misinformation. Repetition does not turn a false statement into a fact, and it does not persuade everyone equally. But familiarity itself can influence truth judgments. (ScienceDirect)

Perhaps we recognize this without needing a laboratory.

The first time a phrase appears, it feels strange.

After many encounters, it no longer feels foreign.

Eventually, I may not even remember exactly where I first heard it.

And once something feels familiar, passing it forward may also become easier. In two experiments, Vellani and colleagues found that repeated misinformation was more likely to be shared, with the effect mediated by higher perceived accuracy. (ScienceDirect)

So perhaps the loop does not need to shout.

It can become familiar.

Expectation → repetition → familiarity → expectation.

And while this happens, B remains just ahead.

What if giving up the belief also feels like giving up the group?

But there were other people waiting with me.

This matters.

Maybe they listened to me.

Maybe I listened to them.

Perhaps, for the first time in a long time, I felt understood somewhere.

Now imagine someone asking:

“What if this story is wrong?”

Do I hear only a factual question?

Or do I also hear:

“What happens to us if it is wrong?”

Contemporary research on identity and misinformation suggests that social identity goals can sometimes compete with accuracy goals, affecting which evidence people seek, which sources they trust, and how they process politically relevant information. This is not unique to one ideology or political group. (ScienceDirect)

Perhaps that helps us feel why a correction can be more difficult than changing one sentence.

Sometimes there is a whole we living inside that sentence.

If the sentence falls, do I fall with it?

Does the group?

Do the relationships?

Maybe that is why the possibility of Jiwasa matters here.

Not a we that requires us to preserve a false explanation.

A we capable of surviving its revision.

Something remains hot even when the promised transition does not occur

Perhaps we can now return to Latent Heat.

Only as a metaphor.

In thermodynamics, latent heat belongs to a real physical phase transition. We are not claiming that political belief or consciousness literally works through thermodynamic latent heat.

But the image may help us notice what is happening.

There was mobilization.

Attention.

Waiting.

Fear.

Hope.

Belonging.

Messages.

Travel.

Conversation.

Prayer.

The Body-Territory moved.

The collective moved.

And yet the promised B did not arrive.

It is as if enormous subjective and social movement becomes concentrated in the almost.

B remains near enough to keep organizing A.

But never present enough to become B.

Maybe this is what makes this transition different from the one we explored previously.

There, we could experience the fullness of being between A and B because we admitted:

we do not yet know B.

Here, the interval begins to be filled by certainty about B.

And if reality contradicts that certainty, another certainty may have to arrive quickly enough to prevent the interval from reopening.

What happens if we do not immediately close the gap?

Let us return to the end of those 72 hours.

The prediction failed.

Before the next video.

Before the new explanation.

Before someone gives us another deadline.

There may be a very small interval.

It did not happen.

Nothing else yet.

Could this also be a transition?

Perhaps even an epiphany?

Not the dramatic epiphany of suddenly possessing the truth.

Something smaller:

I can perceive that reality did not follow my expectation.

Research on misinformation shows that false information can continue influencing reasoning after correction — the continued influence effect — so the collapse of one claim does not necessarily erase the explanatory structure already built around it. (Nature)

But persistence is not destiny. Experimental work on belief perseverance has also found that interventions such as awareness training and counter-speech can reduce persistence after misinformation is retracted. (PLOS)

Maybe this is where Metanoia becomes possible.

Not as political conversion.

Not as moving from one party to another.

Not as exchanging one certainty for the opposite certainty.

Perhaps Metanoia begins when I can remain for a moment in the difference between:

what I needed to happen

and

what happened.

That interval may be uncomfortable.

Stone may want to close it quickly.

The group may already have another explanation.

The feed certainly has another post.

But perhaps I can remain.

A few seconds longer.

Enough to notice:

the world has just surprised me.

Maybe transcendence is not escaping reality

Perhaps transcendence here is almost the opposite.

Not transcending facts.

Not escaping the present.

But, for a moment, transcending the need for reality to obey my expectation.

I can preserve what I felt.

I can preserve relationships.

I can preserve dignity.

And still allow the explanation to change.

Perhaps Jiwasa is possible precisely there.

I may have believed.

You may not have.

On another subject, perhaps our positions will be reversed.

But neither of us needs the other's humiliation for reality to remain between us.

I can say:

“What I felt happened.”

You can remain with me long enough for another sentence to become possible:

“What I expected did not.”

Perhaps those two sentences together contain more freedom than a new promise of another 72 hours.

A transition that never arrives can keep us permanently oriented toward B.

Always almost there.

Always waiting for the next sign.

Always giving the present to a future that keeps moving away.

But maybe the most important event does not happen when B finally arrives.

Maybe it happens when B does not arrive — and, before inventing another B, we manage to remain together with what actually happened.

That brief opening may be enough for an expectation to change.

Enough for an epiphany.

Enough for reality to return.

Perhaps even enough for Metanoia.

Commented References

• Supremo Tribunal Federal — Federal Constitution, Article 142; ADI 6457 decision (2024).
  What this reference represents: it brings the narrative back to a verifiable external reference. Article 142 does not contain a 72-hour rule, and Brazil's Supreme Federal Court unanimously held in 2024 that the Armed Forces do not exercise a “moderating power” between the constitutional branches. In the movement of this text, this is the point where what we feel encounters something that can be checked outside our feeling. (Supremo Tribunal Federal)

• Lupa. (2022). Article 142 of the Constitution Does Not Provide for Military Intervention After 72 Hours of Protests [original in Portuguese].
  What this reference represents: it documents the circulation of the false “72 hours” claim after Brazil's 2022 presidential election. Rather than using it to ridicule those who believed it, the blog uses the episode to enter the difference between expectation and event. (Lupa)

• Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., et al. (2022). The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 13–29.
  What this reference represents: it shows that misinformation can continue influencing reasoning after correction. Removing a false statement does not necessarily rebuild, at once, the explanatory world constructed around it. This is why B can continue shaping the present even after one version of B has failed. (Nature)

• Shing, Y. L., Brod, G., & Greve, A. (2023). Prediction error and memory across the lifespan. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 155, 105462.
  What this reference represents: it gives us a careful scientific language for the encounter between expectation and outcome. Prediction errors can participate in learning and memory updating. In this blog, we use that concept as a lens for the moment when what we expected and what happened cease to coincide, not as a neural diagnosis of any political group. (ScienceDirect)

• Udry, J., & Barber, S. J. (2024). The illusory truth effect: A review of how repetition increases belief in misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 56, 101736.
  What this reference represents: it helps us feel why repetition matters. Familiarity and truth are not the same thing, yet repetition can influence judgments of truth. The promised future may therefore become more subjectively familiar even though repeating it does not make it factual. (ScienceDirect)

• Vellani, V., Zheng, S., Ercelik, D., & Sharot, T. (2023). The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation. Cognition, 236, 105421.
  What this reference represents: it adds movement to repetition. Repeated misinformation was more likely to be shared in the reported experiments, partly through higher perceived accuracy. A sentence can therefore move from Body-Territory to Body-Territory, helping sustain a collective expectation. (ScienceDirect)

• Van Bavel, J. J., Rathje, S., Vlasceanu, M., & Pretus, C. (2024). Updating the identity-based model of belief: From false belief to the spread of misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 56, 101787.
  What this reference represents: it brings belonging into the transition. Beliefs can become connected to social identity, trusted sources, and the groups through which we recognize ourselves. Revising information may therefore sometimes feel like revising not only an idea, but also our location within a we. (ScienceDirect)

• Siebert, J., & Siebert, J. U. (2024). Enhancing misinformation correction: New variants and a combination of awareness training and counter-speech to mitigate belief perseverance bias. PLOS ONE, 19(2), e0299139.
  What this reference represents: it prevents the blog from ending in fatalism. Belief perseverance can occur after misinformation is retracted, but the study found that interventions can reduce it. Remaining inside a belief is not an irreversible destination. (PLOS)

• BrainLatam. (2026). Feeling Is Real. But It Does Not Prove That the Belief Is True [original title: Sentir é verdadeiro. Mas não prova que a crença é verdade].
  What this reference represents: it provides the relational key of the entire text. We do not need to deny an experience in order to revise its explanation. We can preserve the dignity and reality of feeling while still allowing the world to contradict the belief built around it. (brainlatam)

W40/2026 - Latent Heat, Homeostasis and Metanoia