Jackson Cionek

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Does Consciousness Speak a Language?

If we represent in order to move, and by moving we transform the body that will represent again, perhaps consciousness begins before words

Imagine a chef creating a dish that has never existed before.

There is an expectation.

Perhaps the chef can describe it.

Perhaps not.

They begin to cook.

Smell.

Taste.

Bite.

Pause.

Something does not match what was expected.

Perhaps the aroma is right, but the texture is not.

Perhaps the acidity arrives too early.

Perhaps the flavor seems balanced, and yet something in the body still says:

this is not it.

The chef changes the temperature.

Adds an ingredient.

Removes another.

Tastes again.

We do not need to imagine that a complete sentence is being narrated internally throughout this process.

Something may come first:

“The movement I am making is not producing what I expected to feel.”

That difference changes the next movement.

And perhaps this is where we can begin asking a different question about Metacognition.

Not only:

“How do we think about our thoughts?”

But:

How does a Body-Territory perceive what its own movement is producing and use that information to change what happens next?

To reach that question, we first need to clarify where this process is taking place.

3D is not a representation

In BrainLatam’s 5D Consciousness hypothesis, 3D is not an abstract mental space.

It is not a metaphor.

It is not a mathematical representation of the brain.

It is the real three-dimensional space occupied by the living organism.

Brain.

Blood.

Neurons.

Viscera.

Muscles.

Sensory organs.

Posture.

Breathing.

Metabolism.

Everything continues to happen within the physical continuity of one body.

We may measure EEG in one region.

Muscle activity somewhere else.

Heart rate.

Eye movements.

Cerebral oxygenation.

Hormones.

But these are methodological cuts.

The method may divide. The organism was never divided.

Antonio and Hanna Damasio have proposed that conscious mind depends on the continuous production of interoceptive feelings, the production of images related to the organism and its environment, and processes that integrate these signals within a subjective perspective. Their formulation spans peripheral and central physiology, from interoception and exteroception to multiple levels of the nervous system.

BrainLatam takes a conceptual step of its own:

Consciousness does not happen in a brain that carries a body. It happens in a living body that has a brain.

Representations are dynamic configurations of that organism

We now need another distinction.

3D is not the representation.

3D is the physical condition within which any representation can occur.

What we call a representation corresponds, in our hypothesis, to dynamic configurations of that three-dimensional organism.

A smell may recruit one configuration.

Music another.

A word.

A posture.

A memory.

A visceral sensation.

The movement of another person.

These configurations may recruit different brain regions, frequencies, and neural networks.

But they still occur within the same organism — with blood, muscles, viscera, senses, and brain.

And there is something even more important:

A representation does not merely describe what is happening. It can participate in what the organism does next.

This is where representation meets movement.

We represent in order to move

Return to the horse-rider system.

The rider senses the horse’s rhythm.

Its tension.

Direction.

Speed.

Small changes in posture.

These signals contribute to a dynamic representation:

this horse, in this state, in relation to me.

That representation changes the rider’s body.

Posture changes.

Pelvis.

Weight distribution.

Hands.

Muscle tone.

Timing.

The horse perceives those changes.

Responds.

But now the horse is no longer exactly the same system that produced the previous representation.

Its response generates new information.

The rider must represent again.

We have:

perception → representation → movement → transformation of the relationship → new perception → new representation.

This reveals a central property:

We represent in order to move; by moving, we transform the body — and the territory — that will be represented next.

Representation changes the system.

And the changed system will produce the next representation.

The chef also transforms the body that perceives

Now return to the kitchen.

What we call flavor is already a multisensory experience: taste and smell interact intensely, while texture, temperature, and somatosensory information also participate in the experience of food.

An experienced chef does not merely possess more recipes.

Years of tasting, comparing, failing, and correcting have transformed what that chef is capable of distinguishing.

A change in aroma that another person may not even notice can change the chef’s next movement.

This means that experience has not merely added more responses to the repertoire.

It has modified the system capable of perceiving differences.

The same can happen with the pianist.

The athlete.

The rider.

The dancer.

Practice does not only teach new movements to a body that remains the same.

It transforms the body that will later perceive which movements exist.

Here APUS returns.

What is possible also depends on who can perceive it

Two people may stand in the same physical situation and still fail to perceive the same possibilities.

A chef sees possibilities in ingredients.

A musician in a sequence of sounds.

An experienced rider in subtle changes in the horse’s body.

A dancer in relationships between balance, joints, and space that another person may not even imagine.

In the BrainLatam hypothesis:

APUS is the field of movements perceived as possible by a Body-Territory at a given moment.

But now we can add something:

APUS also depends on the history of the system doing the perceiving.

A movement may exist physically and still not exist for me as a possibility.

After learning, experience, or an encounter with another Body-Territory, it may suddenly appear.

The world did not necessarily change.

The body capable of representing it changed.

What if Metacognition begins there?

Perhaps Metacognition does not need to begin with:

“I am thinking about my thinking.”

There is evidence for metacognitive monitoring before the ability to produce complex verbal reports. Infants as young as 12 and 18 months have shown behavioral signs of confidence monitoring and were able to use that information to maintain or change a later decision. The same study also identified an electrophysiological response related to error monitoring.

We also know that confidence judgments can incorporate information coming from one’s own movement. A 2025 study found an interaction between motor and visual evidence in the construction of sensorimotor confidence.

Metacognition can also be investigated in other sensory domains, including olfaction, by comparing performance, confidence, and insight into one’s own accuracy.

This does not mean:

smelling = Metacognition.

Nor:

moving = Metacognition.

BrainLatam proposes something more precise:

5D Metacognition may begin when a Body-Territory incorporates information about the difference between what its movement produced and what it expected to feel, and uses that difference to reorganize the next movement.

The chef tastes.

It does not match.

Changes.

The musician plays.

Listens.

Corrects.

The dancer shifts weight.

Feels balance slipping.

Reorganizes the body.

There is monitoring.

There is comparison.

There is updating.

Words may come later.

“Something does not fit” may come before “I am wrong”

Here we meet again the question raised in our blog about confusion.

An incongruity does not need to arrive as a verbal argument.

It may arrive as:

an unexpected smell;

bodily tension;

a movement being observed;

a musical note;

another person’s facial expression;

a visceral sensation;

a texture.

First:

something does not fit.

Later, perhaps:

“I am wrong.”

Or:

“I need to change.”

Or perhaps no complete sentence appears at all.

There is only a different movement.

This opens an important possibility:

Metacognition may be less like a voice watching thought and more like a recursive property of an organism capable of feeling the consequences of its own movements.

This is a BrainLatam hypothesis.

Language now changes position

If Metacognition can begin before words, this does not make language less important.

Quite the opposite.

It makes language even more interesting.

Because now we can ask:

What can a word do to an organism that already perceives, feels, remembers, and moves?

A word can recruit memories.

Shift attention.

Reorganize relationships.

Stabilize a category.

Open a comparison.

Transmit an experience to another Body-Territory.

Think again about:

failure.

One incorporated history may organize:

failure → shame → threat → hide.

Another semantic reorganization may produce:

failure → difference between expected and obtained → information → update.

The word remains the same.

But the next possible movements have changed.

So:

Language can function as a technology for reorganizing the representational configurations of the Body-Territory.

It does not need to create consciousness in order to transform it.

And a language does not need to be spoken

This is where Deaf communities become fundamental to the theory itself.

A sign language is not an impoverished version of a spoken language.

It is a human language structured in a visuospatial modality.

Hand movement.

Configuration.

Location.

Body.

Facial expression.

Space.

A 2025 study with Deaf adults who used Italian Sign Language showed that perceived effort, confidence, and feelings of understanding during signed narratives could be investigated metacognitively and were related to language proficiency.

This dissolves a poorly framed question:

“How can a Deaf person think without spoken words?”

We no longer need it.

The better question is:

Through which bodily configurations and sensory modalities can a Body-Territory represent and monitor its own movements?

In Latin America this means taking seriously Libras, Chilean Sign Language, and Deaf communities across different territories.

Not as exceptions.

But as scientific opportunities to understand consciousness more deeply.

Biology creates conditions; territory transforms the system

We do not begin from zero.

There is biological history.

A human organism enters the world with a particular sensory, motor, interoceptive, and neural architecture.

But that organism encounters a territory.

Language.

Food.

Smells.

Music.

Climate.

Gestures.

Threats.

Affection.

Technologies.

Other bodies.

And each encounter may change what will be represented later.

This is a central point:

The Body-Territory does not receive culture while remaining biologically untouched, like a container. Experience participates in transforming the very system that will continue to perceive.

Tekoha can then be understood, in BrainLatam’s operational extension, not as a territory stored somewhere inside the brain, but as:

the capacity of previously lived territories to continue participating in the present configurations of the organism.

A smell can allow an absent territory to participate again in the present body.

So can music.

A word.

A gesture.

A food.

And what about Amerindian languages?

Now we can reach them without falling into linguistic determinism.

Mbyá Guaraní, for example, includes grammatical marking patterns that differ substantially from those more familiar to speakers of Portuguese or Spanish, including active-stative and hierarchical patterns of person marking and grammatical relations.

This does not demonstrate that a Mbyá Guaraní speaker has “a different consciousness.”

That would be an unjustified leap.

But it allows a much more interesting scientific question:

If a language repeatedly makes particular relationships among person, agency, action, and affectedness grammatically relevant, can those regularities participate in the representational trajectories recruited during interpretation?

Not:

language determines consciousness.

But:

Body-Territory + language + memory + attention + history may participate in what becomes easier to represent and perceive as possible.

Where science ends and BrainLatam begins

Scientific literature supports the idea that consciousness involves interactions among bodily feelings, images, and subjective perspective.

There is evidence for metacognitive monitoring before explicit verbal report.

There are forms of metacognitive confidence associated with motor and olfactory information.

And Deaf people can monitor confidence, effort, and comprehension through a visuospatial language.

Linguistics also demonstrates enormous diversity in the ways human languages grammatically organize participants and actions.

These findings do not demonstrate 5D Consciousness.

They do not demonstrate APUS.

They do not demonstrate Tekoha.

From this point onward:

BrainLatam.

Our hypothesis is that 3D corresponds to the continuous physical body within which all human representation occurs.

Representations are dynamic configurations of that organism.

They participate in movement.

Movements modify the organism and the territory.

And the modified system produces new representations.

That is why:

We represent in order to move; by moving, we transform the body that will represent again.

Within this process, Metacognition may not need to begin as a word.

It may begin when a difference appears:

“The movement I am making is not producing what I expected to feel.”

Language can then name that difference.

Share it.

Stabilize it.

Question it.

Or create new semantic relationships that make movements previously invisible to APUS begin to appear.