The Five Dimensions of Experience

Every human experience requires a space in which it can unfold.

When a person looks at a tree, listens to a river, studies a formula, or remembers a loved one, each perception mobilizes a multimodal constellation within the Body-Territory.

This constellation involves images, sounds, smells, memories, posture, breathing, muscle tension, interoception, proprioception, belonging, and qualia.

For this reason, Decolonial Neuroscience proposes that human experience unfolds through five dimensions:

three spatial dimensions, one dimension of movement, and one dimension of qualia.

The three spatial dimensions provide form, position, depth, distance, and extension to what is perceived.

The dimension of movement enables transformation. A memory approaches. An emotion grows. A posture changes. A possibility gains strength. Meaning reorganizes itself.

The dimension of qualia provides the subjective brightness of experience. It is the way something is lived and felt by a particular Body-Territory.

A century-old tree, for example, can open entirely different worlds.

For a botanist, it may activate spaces related to classification, species identification, roots, trunk, leaves, photosynthesis, ecosystems, evolution, and scientific methodology.

For an Indigenous person standing before a tree that belongs to their ancestral territory, the same tree may activate ancestry, protection, songs, healing, childhood memories, the smell of the forest, sounds of the land, collective memory, and responsibility toward life.

The same tree opens different representational spaces in different Body-Territories.

The botanist may recruit semantic memories, technical language, morphological comparisons, and the desire to understand.

The Indigenous observer may recruit episodic memory, belonging, lineage, body-land relationships, oral traditions, ancestral presence, and territorial care.

What is perceived always emerges from the encounter between the world and the multimodal reorganization of the Body-Territory.

Spatial representation involves interoception: breathing, heart rate, visceral tension, pH regulation, hunger, thirst, comfort, discomfort, and autonomic regulation.

It involves proprioception: posture, muscle tone, rigidity, balance, gaze direction, spatial orientation, and readiness for movement.

It involves memory: visual images, sounds, smells, words, semantic memories, episodic memories, and affective traces.

It involves belonging: family, culture, language, territory, biome, community, and shared history.

Each perception flows through the Body-Territory as a living reorganization.

DNA Intelligence and Technological Intelligence

DNA Intelligence builds the Body-Territory that feels, regulates, remembers, forgets, perceives, moves, and transforms stimuli into lived experience.

Technological Intelligence organizes external representations: books, maps, graphs, sensors, databases, artificial intelligence, mathematical models, and simulations.

A botanist may use AI to identify a species, compare images, integrate climate data, and generate hypotheses.

An Indigenous person may recognize that same tree through its smell, the sound of its leaves, the stories of elders, its relationship with the river, its fruiting cycle, and a body that has learned to live within that territory.

AI organizes data about the tree.

The Body-Territory lives the tree.

Science measures aspects of the tree.

Belonging reveals ways of relating to it.

Decolonial Neuroscience explores how different forms of knowledge expand our understanding of human experience.

For classification, measurement, and comparison, technology offers extraordinary power.

For living, belonging, caring, and perceiving territory, the Body-Territory expresses a situated, relational, and embodied intelligence.

Scientific Materiality

EEG, fNIRS, HRV, respiration, GSR, EMG, eye-tracking, and behavioral measures help infer the activation of these multimodal representational spaces.

EEG reveals rapid changes in neural dynamics.

fNIRS reveals hemodynamic changes associated with cortical metabolic demand.

Physiological measures provide insights into autonomic regulation, bodily tension, and engagement.

The integration of EEG and fNIRS has emerged as a promising strategy for combining temporal precision with metabolic information in cognitive, clinical, and behavioral research.

These measurements register physiological traces associated with lived experience and the processes accompanying qualia.

They offer windows into the activity of the Body-Territory while preserving the distinction between measurable biological signals and subjective experience itself.

Closing Reflection

A representational space is multimodal.

It involves body, memory, movement, meaning, qualia, and belonging.

The botanist's tree and the Indigenous person's tree share the same physical trunk while opening distinct internal worlds.

Decolonial Neuroscience emerges when we study these worlds through science, evidence, and respect for boundary conditions.

Every human experience unfolds within a Body-Territory.

And every Body-Territory transforms the perceived world into a living space of existence.

Scientific References (Post-2021)

Parma, C. et al. (2024). An Overview of Bodily Awareness Representation and Interoception.

Contribution:
Reviews interoception, proprioception, and bodily awareness as fundamental components of embodied experience.

Palermo, L. et al. (2023). The Body in Neurosciences: Representation, Perception and Space Processing.

Contribution:
Explores multisensory body perception, mental representation, interoception, and spatial processing.

Barrett, L.; Stout, D. (2024). Minds in Movement: Embodied Cognition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Contribution:
Examines embodied cognition, movement, environmental interaction, and implications for artificial intelligence.

Chen, J. et al. (2024). A Cross-Disciplinary Review of the fNIRS-EEG Dual-Modality Imaging.

Contribution:
Reviews advances in integrated EEG-fNIRS approaches for investigating neural activity, cortical metabolism, cognition, and behavior.

Li, R. et al. (2022). Concurrent fNIRS and EEG for Brain Function Investigation: A Systematic, Methodology-Focused Review.

Contribution:
Demonstrates the complementarity of EEG and fNIRS, combining high temporal resolution with hemodynamic and metabolic information.

Foundational Principle

Every perception recruits a multimodal constellation within the Body-Territory.

Every representational space integrates body, movement, memory, belonging, and qualia.

Every human experience emerges through the dynamic interaction of these dimensions.