Learning with Another Brain Beside Me - Hyperscanning and the pedagogy of co-presence

(Consciência em Primeira Pessoa • Decolonial Neuroscience • Brain Bee • O Sentir e Saber Taá)

O Sentir e Saber Taá — feeling another brain beside mine

I sit next to someone.
Before we speak, something in my body shifts:

• my posture adjusts,
  
  

• my breathing changes,
  
  

• my attention “leans” toward them,
  
  

• my skin and muscles register that there is another nervous system close to mine.
  
  

I’m not just with the other person — my body is already computing through them.
This instant, pre-verbal adjustment is Taá in its social form: I feel first, and only then I know.

Hyperscanning is what happens when neuroscience decides to follow this intuition and says:

“Instead of measuring one brain alone, let’s record two brains at the same time, while they share the same world and the same task.”

The study that anchors this blog is exactly that. In 2025, Ignacio Leiva-Cisterna, Paulo Barraza, Eric Rodríguez and Guillaume Dumas published, in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the article:

“Multibrain sensory stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior.”
(search terms: Leiva-Cisterna Barraza Rodríguez Dumas 2025 multibrain sensory stimulation dyadic cooperative behavior hyperscanning EEG SCAN)

They ask a question that I feel in my own body:

What happens when two brains receive the same sensory world at the same time?
Does this shared rhythm make cooperation easier?

And while I read, I also notice something else inside me:

I realize even my words have been colonized.
The language I learned to describe the brain tried to reduce:

• my body to a defective machine,
  
  

• my mind to a computation error or efficiency score,
  
  

• my spirituality to superstition,
  
  

• my politics to consumption and productivity.
  
  

That is why so many neuroscientists avoid questions that might show what colonial science has no name for.
But when I feel my body before I think — when Taá manifests — I sense there is no separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory).

What colonizes is not only history;
it is also the word that forbids us to exist as whole beings.

Each scientific discovery, if read with courage, becomes a small crack of freedom that breaks the grip of Zona 3 and gives the body back to what it has always been: living territory of possible worlds.

The scientific question: can synchronized sensation create synchronized cooperation?

The core question of Leiva-Cisterna, Barraza, Rodríguez and Dumas is deceptively simple:

• Take two people (a dyad).
  
  

• Give them a cooperative task.
  
  

• Expose them to shared, synchronized sensory stimulation (multibrain sensory stimulation).
  
  

• Measure their brains simultaneously with hyperscanning EEG.
  
  

Then ask:

When the sensory world is synchronized, do the brains become more synchronized too?
And, if yes, does that improve cooperation?

It is not “telepathy”. It is something more concrete: if the world that reaches both bodies is temporally aligned, do their internal rhythms align as well?

Methods: hyperscanning EEG, spectral analysis and inter-brain synchrony

For Brain Bee readers, the methods can be visualized like this:

Two people sit together, sharing the same stimuli.
Both wear EEG caps.
The experimenters record two time series of brain activity at the same time.

Technically, the pipeline involves:

• EEG hyperscanning
  
  

• Two EEG systems synchronized;
  
  

• Shared timing of stimuli and behavioral responses.
  
  

• Pre-processing and cleaning
  
  

• ICA (Independent Component Analysis) to remove eye blinks, muscle noise and line noise;
  
  

• Sometimes PCA (Principal Component Analysis) to explore global patterns of variance.
  
  

• FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and spectral analysis
  
  

• Decomposition into classic bands (theta, alpha, beta, etc.);
  
  

• Identification of frequency bands where cooperative tasks modulate power.
  
  

• Inter-brain synchrony metrics
  
  

• Coherence between electrodes of person A and person B;
  
  

• Phase-locking value (PLV) and other measures of phase synchrony;
  
  

• Time-resolved analyses of how synchrony increases during key moments of cooperation.
  
  

• Topography and possible CSD (Current Source Density)
  
  

• Mapping where on the scalp inter-brain coupling is strongest (often frontal and parietal sites);
  
  

• CSD can sharpen spatial detail, reducing volume conduction.
  
  

This is modern hyperscanning EEG: not just “is the brain active?”, but “how do two brains lock into a shared rhythm?”

Results: shared stimulation, shared rhythms, better cooperation

The main findings can be summarized in first person:

• When our sensory stimulation is aligned in time,
  my brain rhythms and your brain rhythms show greater inter-brain synchrony.
  
  

• This synchrony is not random:
  it appears in specific frequency bands and topographies (often fronto-parietal),
  and it is stronger when our behavior is actually cooperative and successful.
  
  

• Dyads with higher inter-brain synchrony under multibrain sensory stimulation
  tend to show better cooperative performance.
  
  

In other words:

When two brains receive the same world at the same time, they can learn to move together.

Reading the study through our concepts

Mente Damasiana: interoception, proprioception and shared world

From a Damasian mind perspective, consciousness is built from:

• interoception (my inner body),
  
  

• proprioception (my body in space),
  
  

• and the world I inhabit.
  
  

In hyperscanning, the outer world is literally the same for both of us — same light, same timing, same task.
This shared external rhythm reshapes how our internal rhythms (interoceptive–proprioceptive cycles) align. The EEG is just the electrical tip of that deeper iceberg.

Quorum Sensing Humano (QSH)

QSH says that humans regulate themselves by:

• gaze,
  
  

• micro-movements,
  
  

• breathing,
  
  

• voice rhythm,
  
  

• and mutual presence.
  
  

Here, multibrain sensory stimulation is like a controlled QSH amplifier:
the environment becomes a common metronome that lets our bodies negotiate a shared tempo for action.

Eus Tensionais and Zones 1/2/3

In a cooperative task, each of us activates specific Eu Tensional:

• focused, alert, available to adjust.
  
  

When the environment is chaotic or unsynchronized, we risk sliding into Zona 1 (automatic, fragmented responses) or Zona 3 (rigid scripts, ideological or anxious control).

When the environment is gently synchronized, it becomes easier to access Zona 2 together:
a space of shared fruição, creativity and mutual trust.
The inter-brain synchrony in Leiva-Cisterna et al. looks like the neural signature of this collective Zona 2.

Yãy hã mĩy (Maxakali) — imitating to become

Yãy hã mĩy, in its extended sense, is the process of:

• imitating movements, rhythms, beliefs and gestures
  
  

• until a new Eu emerges and sustains high-performance action.
  
  

In hyperscanning cooperation, each participant is, in some way, imitating the timing of the other, guided by the shared sensory metronome.
The inter-brain coupling we see is Yãy hã mĩy becoming measurable.

Avatares Referências: who is watching this experiment?

When I look at this study through our Avatares Referências, I feel especially the presence of Olmeca:

• the avatar that sees the world as shared perception,
  
  

• where culture, environment and relationship shape the very form of cognition.
  
  

Olmeca helps me notice that co-presence is already pedagogy.
Before any curriculum, before any slide, there is this: two nervous systems feeling the same world and slowly learning to move together.

Where this adjusts our ideas

This paper gently corrects any temptation to think of cooperation as:

• just moral choice,
  
  

• or just rational calculation,
  
  

• or just individual traits (“I am cooperative / competitive”).
  
  

It shows that cooperation is also infrastructure:

• sensory,
  
  

• temporal,
  
  

• spatial.
  
  

If we want more dialog, less polarization, more Jiwasa (the inclusive “we”), we must design worlds that two or more bodies can safely share.
The nervous system then does what it knows best:
it learns to dance together.

Normative implications for education and LATAM politics

• Education
  
  

• Classrooms and labs should be built as co-presence devices, not only spaces for content delivery.
  
  

• Multibrain sensory stimulation suggests we can design activities where shared timing and rhythm support collaborative learning and Brain Bee style investigation.
  
  

• Urban and digital policy
  
  

• Cities and platforms could be designed to reduce hostile, desynchronizing environments (noise, overload, constant interruption) and increase spaces of shared rhythm (music, dance, collective rituals).
  
  

• Decolonial science
  
  

• Indigenous practices of dancing, singing and ritual around a fire already knew that cooperation emerges from shared rhythm.
  
  

• Hyperscanning simply gives us a new lens to recognize what those practices have always embodied.
  
  

Keywords for scientific search

“Leiva-Cisterna Barraza Rodríguez Dumas 2025 multibrain sensory stimulation dyadic cooperative behavior hyperscanning EEG inter-brain synchrony ICA FFT PCA Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience”