THE YEAR OF THE BRAIN -  BUT WHOSE BODY?

The Neuro Challenge Latam begins where the brain stops being an island

A person enters a neuroscience laboratory.

They sit in front of the researcher. Sensors are placed on their head. Lines, rhythms, and changes in oxygenation begin to appear on the screen. Little by little, something that once seemed invisible starts to take shape.

It is a fascinating moment.

Looking at those signals, we feel that we are finally observing the brain.

But the person did not arrive alone.

They brought with them the previous night, the food available to them, the journey to the laboratory, the language learned at home, and the place where they were able to rest. The noise of the street came with them. So did the water they drank, the people they care for, the fears they learned, and the stories they still carry.

Perhaps none of this appears immediately on the screen.

And yet, all of it entered the laboratory with them.

This perception gives rise to the first Neuro Challenge Latam question:

What kind of brain are we talking about when we leave the body and the territory outside?

In 2026, Chile celebrates the Year of the Brain. The initiative brings together science, education, culture, health, technology, and democracy. In the same year, researchers from different countries will meet at the Congress of the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies, FALAN.

It is a rare opportunity.

An entire country is invited to think about the brain while some of the region’s leading scientific societies gather to share what they have learned about it.

Perhaps this is also the moment to ask what we have not yet learned to perceive.

The brain that fits inside the laboratory

Neuroscience has learned a great deal by simplifying the world.

To understand attention, memory, language, or movement, researchers create controlled tasks, reduce interference, and compare responses. This experimental clearing has made fundamental discoveries possible.

But a clearing still exists inside the forest.

When simplification stops being understood as a method and begins to be confused with reality itself, the abstract brain emerges: a brain separated from the conditions that nourish, protect, exhaust, or threaten it.

The participant is described by age, sex, education, and diagnosis.

Their territory disappears from the table.

But what disappears from the table does not disappear from the body.

Latin American researchers have already begun to reveal this presence.

In 2024, Sandra Báez and her collaborators analyzed EEG recordings from almost 1,400 people across ten countries. Structural inequality was associated with differences in characteristics of brain dynamics, including the complexity and organization of electrical signals.

The study did not identify a “brainwave of poverty.”

It found something more careful, and perhaps more profound: collective conditions may be related to the way brain activity is organized.

Other Latin American researchers, including Hernando Santamaría-García and Agustín Ibáñez, have shown that aging and cognition cannot be understood through age or individual biology alone. Mental health, cardiometabolic conditions, education, and social inequalities also participate in this trajectory.

Little by little, the image changes.

The brain stops looking like an island.

The territory was already inside the body

In Latin America, the concept of Body-Territory has been developed especially by Indigenous women, community feminisms, traditional communities, and movements that recognize continuity between what happens to bodies and what happens to the land.

When water is contaminated, something happens to bodies.

When a community is displaced, something happens to memory.

When a language disappears, ways of perceiving, naming, and sharing the world also disappear.

When a territory remains alive, it continues to produce food, belonging, stories, and possibilities for the future.

Body-Territory is not a new variable created by neuroscience.

It is a way of perceiving that can expand what science considers important to observe.

In Ancestral Future, Ailton Krenak invites us to perceive that rivers, forests, and human beings do not exist as completely separate worlds. Rogério Haesbaert shows that, within Latin American experience, territory is not merely an area outlined on a map. It is a space that is lived, disputed, remembered, and felt.

This perspective does not need to replace the laboratory.

It can help the laboratory ask better questions.

Perhaps you have already felt this before encountering any concept.

There are places where the body relaxes.

There are spaces where we need to remain alert.

There are languages in which certain memories return more easily.

There are environments that allow us to imagine a future, and others that consume all the energy needed simply to move through the present.

The territory is not only around us.

It participates in the way we perceive, remember, and respond.

What could EEG and NIRS make visible?

EEG records electrical changes in the brain with high temporal precision. NIRS tracks changes in oxygenation in superficial cortical regions and makes it possible to study people in situations closer to everyday life.

These technologies could help investigate attention, cognitive effort, and prefrontal activity in situations involving:

• perceived safety and insecurity;

• belonging and exclusion;

• recognition and invisibility;

• environmental noise and overload;

• contact with different narratives about community and identity.

The signals could be combined with heart rate, breathing, behavior, environmental conditions, and first-person reports.

A change in EEG would meet the person’s lived history.

A change in oxygenation would meet the meaning that the situation held for them.

Reaction time would meet the time it took to reach the laboratory.

It is in the encounter between these layers that research can gain materiality without reducing the person to a signal.

The goal would not be to find a “colonial brain.”

Nor would it be to create a universal marker of belonging, oppression, or identity.

It would be to investigate a simpler and more open hypothesis:

Conditions of safety, recognition, connection, and territorial stability may change the way the body mobilizes its resources during cognitive and social experiences.

Perhaps some differences will appear in brain signals.

Perhaps they will appear in behavior.

Perhaps they will emerge only in people’s accounts.

Perhaps some of our hypotheses will need to be abandoned.

That, too, is science.

A question for neuroscience societies

FALAN, the Chilean Society for Neuroscience, the Brazilian Society for Neuroscience and Behavior, and scientific societies in Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and other countries already form a network capable of connecting laboratories and territories.

We can imagine this network developing a Latin American protocol in which communities participate in choosing the questions, creating the tasks, and interpreting the results.

We can imagine conferences where researchers present not only the signals recorded, but also the territory from which those data emerged.

We can imagine the results returning to the people who made their production possible.

In this movement, the participant ceases to be merely the source of a measurement.

They begin to share agency over the knowledge.

Perhaps the Year of the Brain can open this space.

Not only a year for teaching society how the brain works, but a year for asking neuroscience itself what it still needs to learn about the worlds in which brains live.

Because every brain arrives with a body.

Every body arrives with relationships.

Every relationship takes place within a territory.

And every territory contains its own forms of care, memory, suffering, and creation.

When we begin to perceive these continuities, the brain does not lose its materiality.

It gains a world.

The Neuro Challenge Latam begins at this point: when we look at an EEG line or a change in oxygenation and realize that the signal continues beyond the screen.

It continues in the water.

It continues in language.

It continues in the streets, forests, homes, and relationships.

It continues in us.

And perhaps the question that travels through the next conference will not be only what we have discovered about the brain.

Perhaps it will be:

What new worlds become possible when knowledge learns to recognize the territory that made it possible?

Essential references

Báez, S. et al. Structural inequality and temporal brain dynamics across diverse samples. Clinical and Translational Medicine, 2024.

Haesbaert, R. Del cuerpo-territorio al territorio-cuerpo de la Tierra: contribuciones decoloniales. Cultura y Representaciones Sociales, 2022.

Krenak, A. Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras, 2022.

Miranda, C. M.; Barroso, M. F. Mulheres na Amazônia: lutas em defesa de seus corpos-territórios. Revista Estudos Feministas, 2023.

Santamaría-García, H. et al. Factors associated with healthy aging in Latin American populations. Nature Medicine, 2023.

Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation of Chile; Chilean Society for Neuroscience. Year of the Brain 2026.

FALAN. Congress of the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies, Santiago, 2026.