The Brain Does Not Receive Reality Ready-Made -  It Compares

When technologies begin to organize what we perceive as possible

Imagine walking through a city wearing augmented reality glasses.

You look at a street and a message appears:

Recommended route.

You look at a restaurant:

Best option for you.

You look at a product:

Recommended.

You look at a building:

Enter here.

The technology has not replaced the physical world.

But it has placed a new layer over it.

Now a seemingly simple question appears:

what happens when what technology shows us does not match what we expected to find?

In 2026, Michael Wimmer and colleagues published a study in the Journal of Neural Engineering that brings this question to the intersection of brain activity, gaze, and augmented reality.

The researchers combined EEG, eye-tracking, and a brain-computer interface — BCI to investigate whether it would be possible to detect when information presented in augmented reality seemed incongruent to the user.

And they succeeded.

But perhaps the most interesting question begins precisely after that result.

When the brain encounters something unexpected

Augmented reality allows digital information to be superimposed onto the physical environment.

This can be extremely useful.

A person looks at a machine and receives instructions.

Looks at a street and receives directions.

Looks at an object and receives additional information.

But the system can also present something that does not match what the person expected.

Wimmer and colleagues investigated exactly that moment.

Eye-tracking allowed them to identify when participants fixated on the relevant information. From that point, EEG activity was analyzed to observe the brain’s response.

The researchers found a centroparietal N400 effect in response to incongruent information.

The N400 is an event-related potential component often associated with the processing of information that conflicts with a given context or expectation.

In the online experiment, the system was able to distinguish congruent from incongruent information with an average balanced accuracy of around 70%.

This points to an interesting technological application:

a future interface could detect that a piece of information caused surprise or conflict for a user and respond.

It could provide context.

Explain.

Check the data.

Present another piece of information.

But there is a fundamental distinction.

Incongruity does not mean error

If the brain identifies something as unexpected, that does not mean the information is wrong.

Imagine someone who has believed a certain statement for years.

They encounter a new, correct piece of information that contradicts that belief.

There will be incongruity.

But what may need to be updated is the previous expectation.

The opposite can also happen.

The system may present incorrect information, while the user’s expectation is accurate.

So:

surprise is not truth.

expectation is not truth.

N400 is not a neural truth detector.

The brain is comparing what it encounters with something that was already there.

And this is where the question becomes much larger.

What are we comparing the world with?

When we encounter something, we do not begin from zero.

We carry experiences.

Learning.

Memories.

Language.

Culture.

Expectations.

Territory.

Two people may encounter exactly the same information and respond differently because they do not arrive with the same history.

This leads to a central BrainLatam question:

when a technology detects that something contradicts our expectations, where did those expectations come from?

From the individual?

The family?

School?

The territory?

Advertising?

Algorithms?

The social environment?

Probably from many of these places at the same time.

Technology does not merely show the world

Now imagine that the system no longer simply identifies what we are looking at.

It begins to recommend.

Not only:

“There are three possible routes.”

But:

“This is the best route.”

Not only:

“These products exist.”

But:

“This product is for you.”

Not only:

“These news stories are available.”

But:

“This is what you need to see.”

At this point, technology stops merely adding information to the environment.

It begins to organize what becomes more visible.

And what becomes less visible.

This difference may seem small.

It is not.

Because what the system does not show still exists.

But it may stop being part of the possibilities we perceive.

This is where a phrase we have used in BrainLatam discussions acquires a special meaning:

You are standardized by the choices you were never given.

Perhaps the deepest way to restrict a choice is not to forbid it.

Perhaps it is to prevent it from ever appearing as a choice.

If I never see a certain path, I may never need to decide not to follow it.

If a possibility never enters my field of perception, it may continue to exist physically — but cease to exist for me as a possible movement.

APUS: what we perceive as possible

At BrainLatam, we use APUS to describe the perceived field of possible movements available to a Body-Territory.

APUS was not measured by Wimmer and colleagues.

It is a conceptual hypothesis that begins after their study.

Imagine a person facing a city.

Physically, there are hundreds of places they could go.

But how many of those places actually appear to that person as possibilities?

Some may be unknown.

Others may feel inaccessible.

Some may be financially impossible.

Some may not belong to their social network.

Others may never appear in their maps, searches, or recommendations.

So:

physical possibility is not necessarily perceived possibility.

And perceived possibility is not necessarily material possibility.

It is between these dimensions that body, territory, and technology begin to meet.

Technology can expand APUS

Imagine someone arriving at a public hospital for the first time.

They are anxious.

They do not know the building.

They do not know where their examination will take place.

An interface shows:

You are here.

Your appointment is on the second floor.

The elevator is to your left.

A possibility that was previously obscured becomes clear.

In this case, technology may expand perceived possible movements.

But imagine the opposite.

A platform only shows certain services.

Certain businesses.

Certain routes.

Certain opportunities.

The rest has not disappeared.

It simply stopped appearing.

So we need to ask a second question:

can technology also narrow APUS?

The Latin American question

This issue is especially important in Latin America.

Our region contains some of the world’s largest cities and territories with limited connectivity.

Extreme concentrations of wealth alongside deep poverty.

Major technological centers alongside traditional communities.

Hundreds of languages.

Multiple ways of understanding territory, nature, belonging, and knowledge.

So importing a technology does not mean importing only hardware or software.

We may also import:

categories.

priorities.

ways of classifying.

definitions of what deserves to appear first.

Imagine an application identifying an Amazonian plant.

It displays:

species, family, geographic distribution.

Everything may be scientifically correct.

But a community from that territory may also know the same plant through its relationship to food, medicine, memory, seasonality, or knowledge transmitted across generations.

The plant is the same.

The territory of meaning is not.

So we need to ask:

who participates in constructing the digital layer placed over Latin American reality?

Algorithms also construct visibility

Augmented reality is only part of the problem.

Search engines.

Social networks.

Maps.

Video platforms.

Financial apps.

Recommendation systems.

Artificial intelligence.

All of them organize what appears before us.

And the order in which it appears.

They do not need to prohibit a possibility.

They only need to repeatedly prioritize another.

From there, an EEG question begins to meet a social question:

who organizes what our Body-Territory perceives as possible?

If I repeatedly see the same products, ideas, behaviors, routes, and lifestyles, perhaps I am still choosing.

But choosing within which repertoire?

And who selected that repertoire?

This is where the phrase returns:

You are standardized by the choices you were never given.

Standardization may not begin when millions of people choose the same thing.

It may begin earlier:

when millions are repeatedly offered the same narrow set of possibilities from which they are expected to choose.

Where the article ends and BrainLatam begins

Wimmer and colleagues showed that incongruent information presented in augmented reality produced a consistent N400 effect and that a hybrid BCI based on EEG and eye-tracking could detect some of these incongruities in near real time.

Up to this point:

Wimmer and colleagues.

From this point onward:

BrainLatam.

Our question is:

if a technology can detect when what it shows conflicts with our expectations, can it also participate in constructing what we will come to expect?

And then another question appears:

if algorithms organize which paths, information, and opportunities become visible to us, can they also modify what we perceive as possible?

That is a hypothesis we can test.

An experiment for Latin America

Imagine participants from different territories navigating the same environment.

First:

without digital assistance.

Then:

with an interface presenting several possibilities.

Finally:

with a system that prioritizes only some of them.

We could record:

EEG, to follow expectation and incongruity.

Eye-tracking, to discover what becomes visible.

Movement, to observe which paths are actually chosen.

Participant reports, to understand which possibilities were perceived.

And we could ask:

does showing a possibility make it feel more possible?

does failing to show it reduce its presence in the perceived repertoire?

does this effect change across different Body-Territories?

Perhaps technology can expand our possibilities.

Perhaps it can reduce them.

And perhaps we can only distinguish one from the other if we stop asking merely:

“Does the system work?”

and begin asking:

“What kind of human movement is this system making more likely?”

Neuro Challenge Latam

Look at the recommendations, maps, news, and content that reached you today.

Now ask:

how many choices did you make — and how many possibilities never appeared so that you could choose them?

Scientific Reference

Wimmer, M., ElSayed, N., Thomas, B. H., Müller-Putz, G. R., & Veas, E. E. (2026). An online brain-computer interface for detecting incongruity in augmented reality applications. Journal of Neural Engineering, 23(3), 036024. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ae6ff1