Before “I Chose” - Was the Body-Territory Already Participating in the Decision?

When we say “I decided,” we usually locate the beginning of the decision at the moment when we are able to recognize it and narrate it in the first person.

“I thought.”

“I evaluated.”

“I chose.”

But does the decision really begin at that moment?

Or does consciousness encounter a Body-Territory in which an important part of the process was already underway?

This question gains particular strength from the excellent initiative of Carina Pohle, Daniel Büchel, Silvana Bucher Sandbakk, Øyvind Sandbakk, Belinda Pletzer, and Jochen Baumeister, authors of the 2026 study Uncovering a hidden modulator for women in sports: An exploratory study of menstrual pain and brain connectivity, published in Women’s Health.

Pohle and colleagues did something scientifically valuable. Faced with an apparently sufficient classification — phases of the menstrual cycle and contraceptive use — they asked whether an important bodily condition might remain hidden.

Pain.

A Variable That Was Already There

The study used resting-state EEG to investigate functional connectivity in naturally cycling women and users of combined oral contraceptives.

When the researchers considered phases and groups alone, they found no significant global differences in functional connectivity. However, when menstrual pain intensity was incorporated as a covariate, interactions emerged in measures related to brain-network organization, particularly in the theta range.

It is essential not to go beyond what the article demonstrates.

Pohle et al. did not investigate conscious decision-making, did not show that pain determines choices, and did not establish a causal relationship with athletic performance.

Yet their initiative allows us to ask a question that directly interests the Religare framework:

If a bodily condition is already participating in neural organization at rest, how much of what we will later call “my decision” begins in conditions that are not yet part of our conscious narrative?

The importance of Pohle’s work lies precisely in revealing that something relevant could already be present before the variable we normally chose to observe.

Before Consciousness, the Organism Was Not Standing Still

Everyday language often creates an artificial sequence.

First there would be an “I.”

Then this “I” would receive information.

It would think.

Finally, it would decide and tell the body what to do.

Contemporary neuroscience offers good reasons to treat this sequence cautiously.

Agustín Ibáñez and Georg Northoff, for example, have proposed bringing the brain’s intrinsic timescales into dialogue with predictive allostatic interoception. Within this framework, brain and body processes continuously integrate internal states, environmental demands, and anticipations necessary for regulating the organism.

Colombian researcher Hernando Santamaría-García, together with Joaquín Migeot, Vicente Medel, Agustín Ibáñez, and colleagues, extends this perspective by discussing allostatic and interoceptive processes involving the brain, heart, respiration, metabolism, immune system, and environment.

The point is not that the body has “secretly made the decision.”

It is something more fundamental:

when consciousness encounters an experience, it does not encounter an empty organism.

It encounters an organism that is already regulating, anticipating, selecting, comparing, and responding to internal and external conditions.

Body-Territory: The Body Never Arrives Alone

At BrainLatam, we use the concept of Body-Territory to avoid another problematic separation: imagining the individual as a closed unit and the environment as a mere external backdrop.

Across Latin America, different intellectual traditions have challenged this separation through distinct paths.

Colombian anthropologist Astrid Ulloa and Ecuadorian geographer Sofía Zaragocin place bodies-territories, territorialities, natures, and relationships with non-human beings among the dimensions capable of reshaping Latin American feminist geographies.

They are not proposing a neuroscientific theory. Their work instead questions categories that treat bodies and territories as independent entities.

Argentine researchers Ana Britos-Castro and Sofía Zurbriggen move in a related direction in Narrar(nos) desde el cuerpo-territorio. Their work draws on situated epistemologies and proposes methodologies that recognize the sociohistorical and socioterritorial contexts from which we narrate ourselves and produce knowledge.

This contribution is especially relevant to our question.

When we say:

“I chose because…”

the narrative that follows the choice also has a territory.

It is constructed from what we were able to perceive, name, remember, and recognize as relevant.

The Body-Territory is not merely the place where a decision happens.

It participates in the conditions that make certain decisions, perceptions, and narratives possible.

Knowledge Is Also a Relationship

Argentine archaeologist Alejandro Haber, from the Universidad Nacional de Catamarca, offers another important contribution.

In O conhecimento é o relacionamento: cenas de gnosiologia catamarcana, published in 2022, Haber questions the rigid separation between the knower and what is known. His argument arises from archaeology and from a critique of hierarchies between scientific and local forms of knowledge, proposing that knowledge must also be understood through the relationships that constitute it.

We should not confuse this proposal with neuroscientific metacognition.

But it adds a valuable question to Religare:

What if what we know about ourselves also depends on the relationships through which we became capable of knowing?

This changes the meaning of first-person consciousness.

First person does not have to mean an isolated person.

It may instead mean the singular experience of a Body-Territory continuously constituted through relationships.

When “Feeling” and “Thinking” Stop Being Separate Boxes

Recent neuroscience provides another way into this discussion.

Jessica Hazelton, Sol Fittipaldi, Agustín Ibáñez, and colleagues investigated the contributions of interoception and cognition to emotion recognition. Their findings reinforce the importance of considering bodily and cognitive processes together when attempting to understand how emotional states are recognized.

This also prevents us from reducing consciousness to an overly simple sequence:

the body feels → the mind interprets.

There may instead be continuous integration.

And if integration is continuous, the question changes.

We should not ask only:

“When did the person become conscious of it?”

We may also ask:

“Which processes were already participating in what later became a conscious experience?”

This is where we introduce a hypothesis specific to BrainLatam.

Pre-Consciousness Metacognition

We provisionally call this hypothesis pre-consciousness metacognition.

It is important to be clear: we are not presenting this expression as an established or consensual category within neuroscience.

We are proposing a problem to be investigated.

Metacognition is traditionally associated with monitoring or evaluating one’s own cognitive processes: recognizing uncertainty, confidence, error, knowledge, or performance.

Our question is whether there may be an earlier layer, prior to explicit first-person narration, in which the Body-Territory is already monitoring its own conditions, anticipating possibilities, and adjusting relevance, even before it can formulate:

“I am doing this.”

We are not proposing a miniature unconscious observer somewhere inside the brain.

The hypothesis is different.

The organism may continuously modify its internal and external relationships so that, when experiences such as

“I want,”
“I fear,”
“I prefer,”
“I choose”

finally emerge, they already encounter a trajectory.

Pohle et al. offer a provocative example: pain was present, varied between participants, and when it was incorporated into the model, the interpretation of connectivity patterns changed.

How many other modulators participate in us before they become part of our explanation of ourselves?

Doing, Planning, and Choosing

This is where Religare enters.

We propose three inseparable dimensions in the relationship between the Body-Territory and the world:

Science is Doing.

It is acting, experimenting, and encountering the consequences of the world.

Religion is Planning.

It is moving beyond the immediate present to represent what does not yet exist: expectations, possibilities, rules, threats, hopes, utopias, and desirable futures.

Politics is Choosing.

It is attributing value among possibilities: approaching, avoiding, prioritizing, accepting, rejecting.

Religare is not a fourth dimension.

Religare is recognizing that Doing, Planning, and Choosing are already umbilically intertwined within our actions.

Pain helps make this integration visible.

A Body-Territory experiences pain.

It may anticipate:

“If I continue, this may get worse.”

A future is already being represented: Planning.

Faced with alternatives:

“Do I continue or stop?”

There is valuation: Choosing.

The organism then modifies its action:

it continues, withdraws, seeks help, adapts movement.

There is Doing.

The separation among Science, Religion, and Politics begins to disappear within the event itself.

The Future Is Not Outside the Territory

Here, Brazilian Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak offers a particularly fertile contribution.

In Futuro ancestral, published in 2022, Krenak challenges a conception of the future that is entirely detached from the living world of the present. His reflection brings future, ancestry, rivers, Earth, and the continuity of relationships into the same field.

Krenak is not formulating Religare.

But his work helps challenge a deeply rooted assumption:

planning the future does not necessarily mean abandoning the territory in order to construct an abstraction about what is to come.

For Religare, this is fundamental.

We plan from within a Body-Territory.

We choose from within it.

We act within it.

And every act produces new conditions for the next act of Planning and the next act of Choosing.

It is not a circle returning to the same place.

It is a spiral.

Before Asking “Why Did You Choose?”

Perhaps the most important lesson we draw from the initiative of Pohle and colleagues is methodological.

They found relevance by asking about a variable that had remained hidden.

Religare attempts to carry a similar scientific gesture into first-person consciousness.

When someone says:

“I decided,”

we are not trying to deny their decision.

We are trying to expand the question.

What was the condition of the Body-Territory?

What was already being felt?

Which experiences were available?

Which possibilities were beginning to be anticipated?

What gained value?

What lost value?

What was already being done before the sentence appeared:

“This was my choice”?

Perhaps pre-consciousness metacognition is precisely an attempt to bring conscious experience closer to the processes that participate in its formation.

And perhaps Religare is not about finding a consciousness outside the body.

Perhaps it is exactly the opposite:

to perceive, in the first person, that what we call “I” was already Doing, Planning, and Choosing within a Body-Territory before it became able to tell the story of its own decision.

Main Reference

Pohle, C., Büchel, D., Sandbakk, S. B., Sandbakk, Ø., Pletzer, B., & Baumeister, J. (2026). Uncovering a hidden modulator for women in sports: An exploratory study of menstrual pain and brain connectivity. Women’s Health, 22, 17455057261456871. DOI: 10.1177/17455057261456871.

Complementary References

Britos-Castro, A., & Zurbriggen, S. (2022). Narrar(nos) desde el cuerpo territorio. Nuevos apuntes para un pensamiento situado y metodologías en contexto. Ánfora, 29(52), 43–70. DOI: 10.30854/anf.v29.n52.2022.848.

Haber, A. (2022). O conhecimento é o relacionamento: cenas de gnosiologia catamarcana. Revista de Arqueologia, 35(1), 39–52. DOI: 10.24885/sab.v35i1.957.

Hazelton, J. L., Fittipaldi, S., Fraile-Vazquez, M., et al. (2023). Thinking versus feeling: How interoception and cognition influence emotion recognition in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Cortex, 163, 66–79. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.02.009.

Ibáñez, A. (2022). The mind’s golden cage and cognition in the wild. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(12), 1031–1034. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2022.07.008.

Ibáñez, A., & Northoff, G. (2024). Intrinsic timescales and predictive allostatic interoception in brain health and disease. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 157, 105510. DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105510.

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Santamaría-García, H., Migeot, J., Medel, V., Hazelton, J. L., et al. (2025). Allostatic Interoceptive Overload Across Psychiatric and Neurological Conditions. Biological Psychiatry, 97(1), 28–40. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2024.06.024.

Ulloa, A., & Zaragocin, S. (2022). Diàlegs sobre feminismes, ambientalismes i racismes des de les geografies feministes llatinoamericanes. Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 68(3), 481–491. DOI: 10.5565/rev/dag.743.