How Many Movements Exist Within a Single Being?
How Many Movements Exist Within a Single Being?
The heart accelerates, breathing changes, and the brain responds. Yet the conditions in which we live also participate in shaping what we can feel.
BrainLatam Special Series | 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at UFABC — 2026
THE HEART YOU CAN FEEL
Imagine you have just climbed a few steps.
Perhaps you can feel your heart beating faster. Your breathing responds to the effort. Your muscles have participated in the movement, while your body continues adjusting circulation and energy consumption.
Now imagine meeting someone you deeply care about.
Your heart may also accelerate. Yet the experience could be entirely different.
In one situation, you recognize physical effort. In the other, you may experience joy, surprise, or anticipation.
Your heart participates in both experiences, but it does not determine, by itself, what you feel.
What allows us to recognize one sensation as fatigue and another as emotion?
As you read, thousands of processes continue unfolding within your body. Some become part of your awareness. Others remain beyond it.
How many movements are taking place within what we perceive as a single Being?
This question resonates with the 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), scheduled for November 16–19, 2026, in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil.
Under the theme “The Brain in Context: Contemporary Challenges in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience,” the symposium creates opportunities to investigate the relationships among brain, body, environment, and behavior.
As a sponsor, BrainLatam proposes exploring these relationships by bringing neuroscience, physiology, philosophy, and the social conditions of existence into conversation.
THE BODY DOES NOT WAIT FOR THOUGHT
While you read, your organism continues working.
Your heart pumps blood. Your lungs participate in gas exchange. Your nervous system receives information from inside and outside your body. Hormones and metabolic processes help regulate physiological needs.
Some of these activities may reach conscious awareness.
Neuroscientist António Damásio, in Feeling & Knowing (2021), develops an interpretation of the importance of feelings in regulating life and shaping conscious experience.
From this perspective, feeling participates in the relationship between an organism and the conditions of its own existence.
We may recognize an interesting implication: perceiving an accelerated heartbeat involves physiological processes, but the experience also depends on the situation in which that movement occurs.
The same bodily signal may be interpreted differently according to our memories, expectations, and circumstances.
The experience of Being therefore involves more than locating brain activity.
THE HEART PARTICIPATES IN WHAT WE PERCEIVE
Chilean researcher Diego Candia-Rivera and colleagues published a review in 2024 examining interoception, network physiology, and bodily self-awareness.
Interoception refers to the processes involved in detecting and integrating signals originating within the organism.
These signals may contribute to bodily perception and different emotional experiences.
This does not mean that the heart thinks independently of the brain.
It means that cardiac and neural processes maintain physiological relationships relevant to how we perceive.
Perhaps we can formulate another question:
Does what we experience as ONE depend on many systems working simultaneously?
Science allows us to study components of these relationships. Yet recording heartbeats is not equivalent to knowing the entirety of a person's subjective experience.
Feeling and measuring offer different forms of knowledge that can enter into dialogue.
BREATHING ALSO PARTICIPATES IN THE BRAIN'S TIMING
Notice your breathing, without needing to change it.
Perhaps you recognize a rhythm. Perhaps your attention has already shifted elsewhere.
In 2025, Brazilian researcher Adriano B. L. Tort, together with Diego Laplagne, Andreas Draguhn, and Joaquin Gonzalez, published a review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience showing that neural activity can exhibit modulations associated with the respiratory cycle.
The evidence includes humans and other mammals.
Certain brain oscillations follow temporal components of breathing, including in regions involved in emotion and cognition.
These findings do not demonstrate that breathing determines thoughts or feelings.
They do, however, expand our understanding of how different physiological rhythms participate in the organization of brain activity.
The Being we perceive as a unity continues unfolding through multiple movements.
CAN FEELING BE INVESTIGATED SCIENTIFICALLY?
Brazilian researcher Alfredo Pereira Júnior, from São Paulo State University (UNESP), and Vinícius Jonas de Aguiar proposed, in 2023, the foundations of Sentiomics, an approach dedicated to investigating patterns associated with the capacity to feel.
The authors distinguish the empirical investigation of psychobiological patterns from the description of the subjective qualities of experience.
This distinction touches upon one of the greatest challenges in consciousness research.
We can record electrical, hemodynamic, and physiological signals.
But how do we relate them to the experience of feeling joy, fear, or belonging?
Sentiomics presents a theoretical research proposal rather than a definitively established explanation of consciousness.
Its contribution to our discussion lies in recognizing that the capacity to feel deserves its own research questions.
And perhaps these questions become richer when we investigate organisms within their relationships.
METABOLISM ALSO CHANGES OUR POSSIBILITIES
Imagine someone who has gone many hours without eating.
Hunger may modify their attention, priorities, and the choices that seem most urgent.
The organism possesses complex mechanisms for integrating energy availability, hormonal signals, and behavior.
Renata Frazão, from the University of São Paulo, is among the researchers announced for the symposium. Her research investigates hypothalamic mechanisms involved in reproduction, metabolism, and hormonal regulation.
These investigations help us understand how physiological conditions participate in processes fundamental to the continuity of life.
Another announced participant, Leonardo Santana Novaes, also from the University of São Paulo, will present the provisional topic “From Body to Brain: Integrative Pathways Shaping Emotion and Behavior.”
His group investigates bidirectional communication between bodily signals and neural circuits involved in emotions, stress, and motivated behaviors.
These fields demonstrate how brain function continuously participates in the organism's needs.
Yet there is another dimension.
WHO HAS THE CONDITIONS TO CONTINUE BEING?
Imagine two people climbing the same steps.
One has rested, eaten, and has time to recover.
The other worked through the night, slept very little, and is still searching for their first meal.
The physical movement may have been similar.
Their bodily and social conditions, however, are different.
We can investigate how sleep, nutrition, physical effort, and stress influence physiological responses. But we must also ask why these conditions are distributed unequally.
Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza, a former full professor at UFABC, examines in A ralé brasileira (The Brazilian Underclass), republished in a new edition in 2022, how structural inequalities and relationships of social recognition shape everyday life.
His research does not seek to explain neural circuits.
Instead, it offers an essential sociological dimension: opportunities for development and participation also depend on the material and institutional conditions in which we live.
Damásio helps us investigate feeling. Alfredo Pereira Júnior proposes pathways for studying sentience. Jessé Souza expands the question toward the social conditions of existence.
Our hearts may beat within all of us. But the territories in which each heart must continue beating offer profoundly different possibilities for life.
BODY-TERRITORY: AN INDIVISIBLE UNITY
At BrainLatam, we propose Body-Territory (Corpo-Território) as an indivisible unit of existence, sensitivity, and participation in the world.
Our original hypothesis states:
Consciousness is a movement that perceives itself as Being within the metabolism it produces.
Here, metabolism is used in an expanded conceptual sense, encompassing movements of matter and energy related to the conditions of existence of a Body-Territory.
This formulation does not replace scientific definitions of metabolism or consciousness, nor does it constitute an experimentally validated theory.
Rather, it seeks to broaden our questions.
How do environmental conditions participate in bodily experience?
How can we investigate someone's brain without disregarding the social conditions accompanying their existence?
A decolonial perspective also invites us to recognize Latin American and Indigenous knowledge concerning bodies, territories, and relationships among living beings, while respecting their distinct origins.
The unity of Body-Territory does not imply uniformity among individuals.
It means recognizing the uniqueness of each existence.
A LABORATORY WITHIN LIFE
Imagine a preserved Atlantic Forest, with advanced technologies integrated into the Biome.
Researchers monitor brain, cardiac, and respiratory activity during everyday experiences.
Today, EEG, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), ECG, and respiratory sensors already allow us to investigate different dimensions of neurophysiological activity.
Integrating these measurements may reveal temporal and physiological relationships that would be less apparent in isolated recordings.
As a representative of Artinis & NIRx and Brain Products, BrainLatam connects researchers with advanced technologies for functional neuroimaging, electroencephalography, and multimodal investigation.
No instrument, however, can independently capture the totality of subjective experience.
Technology expands what we can observe. Interpretation requires scientific rigor and interdisciplinary dialogue.
HOW MANY MOVEMENTS CAN PARTICIPATE IN A WE?
Let us return to the heart that accelerated after climbing those steps.
Now imagine two people walking together.
Their movements and physiological rhythms may exhibit relationships during the shared activity.
This does not demonstrate the existence of a collective consciousness.
Each person continues living their own unique experience.
At BrainLatam, we use Jiwasa to explore shared agency without erasing individual differences.
We can participate in collective processes while continuing to Be.
The UFABC symposium invites us to investigate these possibilities by integrating body, brain, metabolism, and context.
Perhaps the question that began with our heartbeat can accompany us on our next walk:
How many movements participate in the experience of Being, and how many conditions must we preserve so that everyone can continue Being?
About This Series
This article is part of a special series by BrainLatam, a sponsor of the 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), scheduled for November 16–19, 2026, in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil.
The text engages with the research topics announced for Leonardo Santana Novaes and Renata Frazão. BrainLatam's original hypotheses and interpretations do not necessarily represent the positions of these researchers or the event organizers.
Official event website: https://www.even3.com.br/viii-simposio-em-neurociencia-e-cognicao-da-universidade-federal-do-abc-761401/
References — A Second Reading of the Article
1. Feelings participate in the construction of our conscious experience.
Damásio, A. (2021). Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon Books.
The Portuguese neuroscientist investigates the relationships among feelings, the regulation of life, and consciousness.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/1200832168
2. Signals from the heart and other organs participate in bodily perception.
Candia-Rivera, D.; Engelen, T.; Babo-Rebelo, M.; Salamone, P. C. (2024). Interoception, network physiology and the emergence of bodily self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 165, 105864.
The review, led by the Chilean researcher, examines how internal signals and sensory information contribute to bodily self-awareness.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105864
3. Breathing can modulate brain activity associated with perception and cognition.
Tort, A. B. L.; Laplagne, D. A.; Draguhn, A.; Gonzalez, J. (2025). Global coordination of brain activity by the breathing cycle. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 26, 333–353.
Researchers with scientific affiliations in Brazil and Uruguay examine how respiratory rhythms relate to activity across different brain regions.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00920-7
4. The capacity to feel can also be investigated through psychobiological patterns.
Pereira Júnior, A.; Aguiar, V. J. (2023). Fundamentos e aplicações da sentiômica: a ciência da capacidade de sentir [Foundations and Applications of Sentiomics: The Science of the Capacity to Feel]. Trans/Form/Ação, 46, 57–86, Special Issue 1.
The Brazilian authors present Sentiomics as an approach to studying the capacity to feel, distinguishing it from the subjective description of qualia.
https://doi.org/10.1590/0101-3173.2023.v46esp1.p57
5. The brain integrates metabolic needs and bodily signals when regulating behavior.
Frazão, R. Laboratório de Neurofisiologia da Reprodução [Reproductive Neurophysiology Laboratory]. Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of São Paulo.
This research program investigates neural circuits involved in reproduction and their relationships with hormonal and metabolic conditions.
https://sites.usp.br/neuroreplab/pt/home/
6. The body and brain communicate continuously to regulate emotions and responses to the environment.
Novaes, L. S. Interação Corpo–Encéfalo na Modulação do Comportamento [Body–Brain Interaction in the Modulation of Behavior]. Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of São Paulo.
The research group investigates neural mechanisms connecting physiological states with emotional and behavioral responses.
https://ww3.icb.usp.br/leonardo-novaes/
7. Social inequalities shape the concrete conditions in which we live.
Souza, J. (2022). A ralé brasileira [The Brazilian Underclass]. New edition. Civilização Brasileira.
The Brazilian sociologist and former UFABC professor investigates the reproduction of inequalities and the experiences of socially marginalized populations.
https://www.record.com.br/products/a-rale-brasileira/
8. Investigating the brain in context requires integrating biology, cognition, technology, and society.
UFABC (2026). 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition — The Brain in Context: Contemporary Challenges in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience.
The symposium brings together different research fields to broaden scientific questions concerning the brain and its relationships.
Conceptual note: Body-Territory, 5D Consciousness, and Jiwasa are original conceptual frameworks developed by BrainLatam. The scientific and sociological references support specific aspects of the discussion but do not constitute empirical validation of these proposals.
BRAINLATAM · W45/2026 · BLOG 02 · ENGLISH EDITION
