The Moment A Begins to Cease Being A

Breathing, allostasis, and movement completion in the transition between states

Before We Continue, Notice

You are reading.

As your eyes move across these words, your body breathes, adjusts its posture, and engages in movements that may not yet have entered your awareness.

Without trying to control anything, notice one inhalation.

Did you notice it?

Perhaps the movement changed when you decided to observe it. Perhaps it did not.

We do not need to arrive at the same answer.

But something interesting has already happened: we have begun investigating an experience that neither of us can live on behalf of the other.

Now, let us enter another situation together.

Five Hunters in the Atlantic Forest

We are in the Atlantic Forest, thousands of years ago.

Imagine five hunters from a group associated with what archaeologists today call the Umbu tradition.

Brazilian archaeologists Pedro Ignácio Schmitz and Jairo Henrique Rogge documented sites associated with this tradition in Taió, Santa Catarina, including projectile points, stone tools, and evidence of ancient occupations. Mercedes Okumura and Astolfo Araujo investigated the diversity of these technologies in southern Brazil.

We do not know exactly how these groups organized their hunts. The scene we are about to construct is imagined, although inspired by this archaeological context.

The ground is damp.

Dense vegetation makes it difficult to see what lies ahead.

You hear a bird. Then, leaves moving.

One hunter notices something among the trees.

His pace slows.

The second hunter has not yet seen the animal, but notices the change in his companion's body.

The third adjusts his position.

The fourth interrupts a movement he had already begun.

The fifth remains attentive to another direction.

Perhaps someone makes a brief sound. Perhaps there is a gesture. Perhaps no deliberate signal is necessary at that moment.

When did these five individuals begin acting as a collective?

We do not yet know.

Perhaps they are simply following the most experienced hunter. Perhaps each is anticipating the movements of the others.

But we can notice something: they remain five distinct Body-Territories.

Their movements do not need to be identical to participate in the same action.

The Movement That Never Happened

Let us return to the fourth hunter.

He was about to move forward.

His body was prepared.

Then he noticed that the first hunter had stopped.

His movement did not happen.

But did it disappear?

Perhaps it was inhibited. Perhaps it was replaced by another movement. Perhaps the pause allowed him to perceive something that moving forward would have prevented him from noticing.

Now the animal changes direction.

The previous possibilities no longer correspond to the situation.

The hunters must reorganize themselves.

One prepared movement becomes unnecessary. Another becomes possible. Information perceived by just one participant may transform the actions of everyone else.

At what moment did A begin to cease Being A?

We do not need to imagine a supernatural transformation.

We are looking for the moment when one functional organization begins giving way to another.

And we must also observe what never became a visible gesture.

Allostasis: Preparing Possibilities

The organism does not remain motionless, waiting for events to unfold.

It prepares responses, adjusts resources, and anticipates demands.

We call allostasis the regulatory processes through which physiological systems adapt to present and anticipated needs.

Latin American researchers such as Joaquín Migeot, Carolina Panesso, Claudia Duran-Aniotz, Agustín Ibáñez, and Sebastián Lipina have emphasized the importance of understanding allostasis in relation to environmental conditions, inequalities, and developmental trajectories.

This brings neurobiology closer to our conception of the Body-Territory.

The five hunters are not responding only to the animal.

They are responding to the forest, the terrain, their own metabolic conditions, and their companions' movements.

We can imagine respiratory, muscular, and cardiovascular changes accompanying these actions.

But we cannot claim that they were all breathing in synchrony.

Nor can we claim that their brains exhibited neural coupling.

The scene offers us questions, not measurements.

What happens when the body prepares a movement, but circumstances require that movement to be transformed before it is executed?

Movement Completion: Continuing Does Not Mean Executing

At BrainLatam, we have developed the hypothesis of Movement Completion.

We propose investigating a possible progression:

Mobilization → Perception → Intention → Gesture → Feedback → Meaning → Choice → Transition.

This is not a mandatory sequence.

The fourth hunter may voluntarily interrupt his movement.

That does not mean he has failed.

Perhaps his best action is precisely not to perform the movement he initially prepared.

Completion does not require executing every impulse.

It invites us to investigate whether mobilization finds conditions for perception, reorganization, feedback, and renewed choice.

In our conceptual framework, we use the term Anergia to question situations in which mobilization does not find sufficient conditions for transformation or recovery.

We are not proposing that physical energy becomes trapped in the muscles.

We are trying to understand experiences in which possibilities for action remain restricted.

Now leave the forest for a moment.

Imagine a meeting where you want to disagree but fear losing your sense of belonging.

A response begins to form.

You remain silent.

Was that a free choice? An appropriate inhibition? Or a restriction produced by the relationship?

We can investigate these differences without assuming that every interrupted action causes suffering.

Does Breathing Participate in This Story?

Let us return to the hunters.

One notices something.

Another waits.

A third changes direction.

All five continue breathing.

Respiratory frequency may change with effort, attention, emotion, and action preparation.

In animal studies, Daniel Rojas-Líbano, José Ignacio Egaña, and colleagues investigated relationships between diaphragmatic breathing and neural rhythms.

In humans, Christina Zelano and colleagues demonstrated that nasal breathing can entrain limbic oscillations and influence performance on certain cognitive tasks.

These findings do not demonstrate that coordination among hunters depends on respiratory synchronization.

But they allow us to ask:

Does breathing reorganize before, during, or after a change in shared action?

Perhaps different participants exhibit different responses.

Perhaps one breathes faster while another reduces movement.

Therefore, we should not search only for identical rhythms.

We need to investigate temporal relationships among perception, breathing, motor preparation, and collective events.

What Hutcheon Taught Us About Transitions

In 2023, Evan Hutcheon and colleagues investigated associations between oxygen saturation and EEG activity during experimental hypoxia.

One finding deserves attention: during the initial phase of oxygen desaturation, certain relationships between oxygenation and electroencephalographic measurements differed from those observed under stabilized conditions.

The study did not investigate hunters, belonging, or transcendence.

Nor should we induce hypoxia to study Jiwasa.

Its contribution here is methodological.

The transition between states may contain information that does not appear when we observe only the beginning and the end.

Imagine having just two images of the hunt.

In the first, the five hunters are walking.

In the second, they are standing still.

How much would we miss about prepared movements, shared perceptions, and decisions transformed between those images?

Perhaps we need to study events as they emerge.

From Coordination to Jiwasa

Chilean neuroscientists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana contributed to understanding cognition in relation to the organization of living systems and their history of interactions.

This perspective helps us recognize that the hunters are not five brains disconnected from one another.

But they do not automatically form a single mind either.

They may be coordinated by necessity.

They may follow commands.

They may learn reciprocally.

The BrainLatam hypothesis distinguishes these possibilities.

A genuine Jiwasa requires us to investigate whether each Body-Territory preserves the ability to perceive, propose, modify, and refuse actions.

Perhaps the most experienced hunter recognizes a possible route.

Perhaps the youngest notices something unexpected.

If that information can change the shared decision, we have a potential example of reciprocity.

We do not know whether this happened among ancient Umbu groups.

But we can design contemporary experiments to investigate similar situations.

And What About the Connectomic Reserve?

In 2026, Roberto Lent, Fernanda Tovar-Moll, and Diego Szczupak presented the Connectomic Reserve hypothesis: the possibility that available anatomical connections contribute to processes of neuroplasticity.

BrainLatam proposes an additional question.

Could certain relationships allow the recruitment of functional configurations that are rarely used under individual conditions?

We call this possibility the Relational Connectomic Reserve.

We must distinguish subjective experience, functional reorganization, and the demonstration that reserve anatomical connections are involved.

A perceived transformation does not automatically prove the others.

That is precisely why we want to investigate.

Five Body-Territories in an Experiment

We can bring the question from the forest into a safe cooperative task.

Five participants must locate information, anticipate changes, and jointly decide how to act.

We use EEG, fNIRS, ECG, heart rate variability analysis, and two respiratory belts for each participant.

We record movements, communication, and decision-making events.

We compare individual actions, externally instructed responses, and situations in which any participant can modify the group's strategy.

We seek to identify movements that were prepared, inhibited, executed, or reformulated.

We must also control for speech, physical effort, movement, and physiological variations that influence brain signals.

Our objective is not to prove Jiwasa in advance.

It is to discover which conditions allow individual possibilities to become shared capacities.

When A Begins to Cease Being A

Let us return to the Atlantic Forest.

The five hunters remain alert.

The animal may escape.

The hunt may end without food.

Even so, their movements may have produced learning.

Perhaps one perceived something the others had not yet noticed.

Perhaps another prepared a gesture that had to be abandoned.

Perhaps the group discovered a new way of acting.

We do not know.

But now we have questions we can bring into the laboratory.

In Politics, how many movements toward participation are prepared but never find opportunities for expression?

In Science, how many questions remain unexplored?

In Religion, how many experiences could find new paths when freedom of conscience allows people to belong without being required to obey?

The Jiwasa-State emerges as a proposal to investigate institutions that preserve the agency of Body-Territories while expanding their possibilities for collective construction.

Before finishing, notice your breathing again.

You are not one of those five hunters.

But perhaps you followed their movements, anticipated decisions, and imagined possibilities that were not present when you began reading.

Did something change in your experience?

We do not need to agree.

We can investigate.

Perhaps transcending our Being does not mean abandoning who we are, but finding conditions to perceive, transform, and choose movements that were previously unavailable.

And our question remains open:

Does breathing precede, accompany, or follow the moment when a Body-Territory transforms a prepared movement into a new possibility for collective action?

Annotated References

Schmitz, Pedro Ignácio; Rogge, Jairo Henrique (2015). Tradição Umbu na Mata Atlântica de Taió, SC. Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano – Series Especiales, 2(4), 154–166. Documents occupations associated with the Umbu tradition in the Atlantic Forest of Santa Catarina. Provides the archaeological background, not evidence of the specific behaviors imagined in the narrative.

Okumura, Mercedes; Araujo, Astolfo G. M. (2014). Long-term cultural stability in hunter–gatherers. Journal of Archaeological Science, 45, 59–71. Examines the technological continuity of bifacial projectile points in southern Brazil, contributing to our understanding of traditions and learning across generations.

Migeot, Joaquín; Panesso, Carolina; Duran-Aniotz, Claudia; et al. (2024). Allostasis, health, and development in Latin America. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 162, 105697. Connects allostasis, social conditions, and developmental trajectories in Latin America.

Hutcheon, Evan A.; Vakorin, Vasily A.; Nunes, Adonay; et al. (2023). Associations between spontaneous electroencephalogram oscillations and oxygen saturation across normobaric and hypobaric hypoxia. Human Brain Mapping, 44, 2345–2364. Demonstrates the importance of examining transient physiological changes without establishing a direct relationship with collective emergence.

Rojas-Líbano, Daniel; Frederick, Donald E.; Egaña, José I.; Kay, Leslie M. (2014). The olfactory bulb theta rhythm follows all frequencies of diaphragmatic respiration in the freely behaving rat. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 214. Investigates coupling between respiratory rhythms and neural activity in an animal model, with contributions from Chilean researchers.

Zelano, Christina; Jiang, Heidi; Zhou, Guangyu; et al. (2016). Nasal respiration entrains human limbic oscillations and modulates cognitive function. The Journal of Neuroscience, 36, 12448–12467. Relates nasal respiration to brain oscillations and human cognitive processes.

Lent, Roberto; Tovar-Moll, Fernanda; Szczupak, Diego (2026). The secret connections of the brain: a connectomic reserve for neuroplasticity?. Brain, 149, 2273–2285. Presents the Connectomic Reserve hypothesis, opening new possibilities for investigating functional reorganization.

Maturana, Humberto; Varela, Francisco (1984). El árbol del conocimiento: las bases biológicas del entendimiento humano. Editorial Universitaria. A foundational Chilean contribution to understanding cognition, living-system organization, and relationships between organisms and their environments.

BrainLatam (2026). Completude do Movimento. Develops the original hypothesis concerning mobilization, perception, feedback, choice, and transition, central to this article.

BrainLatam (2026). Quando eu Sinto o Retorno, eu Viro Dono do Passo. Explores the relationship between sensory feedback, movement, and the sense of agency.

Make the central thesis explicitAdd the BrainLatam foundations

BrainLatam | W44/2026 · Breathing, Allostasis, Movement Completion, and Relational Connectomic Reserve