Words That Make the Body Return

When Words Begin to Trap Us

Try not to look for a definition. Just read slowly:

Family.

Homeland.

God.

Failure.

Communism.

Science.

Perhaps some of these words passed through almost without leaving a trace. Perhaps another immediately opened a memory, an image, a person, a tension, a hope.

We can observe this together without deciding whether the response is good or bad.

In the previous texts, we followed a path that began with experience:

experience -> feeling -> word -> sentence -> explanation -> belief

But at some point, the path may begin to work in the opposite direction as well.

The word that emerged as an attempt to organize an experience becomes capable of calling back parts of that experience.

word -> memory -> expectation -> bodily organization -> feeling

The question is no longer only what a word means.

We begin to ask:

When a word touches me, am I encountering the world again, or am I returning to a path my Body-Territory has learned?

A word can function as an address

"Family" does not take all of us to the same place.

For someone, it may evoke a table, food, grandparents, protection.

For another person, abandonment.

For another, pressure.

For another, violence.

The word remains recognizable among us, but the paths it reaches were built through different histories.

Contemporary research on embodied language helps us avoid a simplistic interpretation in which each word would automatically trigger a specific bodily response. The consensus coordinated by Agustín Ibáñez and colleagues emphasizes that context, individual differences, and sensorimotor experiences participate in the construction of meaning.

Perhaps, then, we can think of a word less as a button and more as a learned address.

When someone says "God," "failure," or "homeland," we do not necessarily reconstruct our entire history consciously before something begins to happen.

Some paths are already highly available.

The brain distinguishes words before we finish reflecting on them

EEG studies allow us to observe a small part of this process.

In 2024, Kai Zhang, Jiaxin Li, and Feng Gu compared emotionally charged Chinese words with neutral words. Across two different tasks, emotional words produced electrophysiological differences around 300 milliseconds, compatible with the so-called early posterior negativity - EPN, a component associated with the prioritization of emotionally relevant stimuli. The effect appeared even when the main task did not require participants to judge the emotional quality of the word. (Frontiers in Psychology)

This does not mean that an EEG can look at the word "family" and reveal our family history.

Still less does it mean that it has found "the feeling."

It means something more limited and, for our purposes, sufficiently interesting:

a learned word can begin to reorganize processing before we have finished constructing a conscious explanation about it.

fNIRS also offers a complementary window. In 2023, Gao and colleagues observed hemodynamic differences between morphological and semantic relationships during word processing in bilingual participants, involving left frontal and temporal regions. (npj Science of Learning)

Again, we are not locating "meaning" in a particular brain region.

We are noticing that meaning, memory, context, and language participate in an organism that already carries previous pathways.

What if a pathway works too well?

Here we can borrow a metaphor from evolutionary computation.

In optimization systems, a solution may work well enough that the process begins to explore mainly its surrounding region. Evolutionary algorithms use mechanisms that preserve diversity and introduce mutation precisely to reduce the risk of premature convergence and reopen the exploration of the solution space.

We are not claiming that the human brain is an evolutionary algorithm.

We are using the image to ask something about ourselves.

Perhaps some networks of words, beliefs, memories, and feelings form semantic-affective local optima.

A familiar word quickly finds a familiar memory.

The memory favors a familiar explanation.

The explanation produces a certain expectation.

And the expectation helps organize the next feeling.

The system keeps working.

We may even experience enormous emotional diversity within it.

We may love.

Fear.

Hope.

Suffer.

Celebrate.

Feel indignation.

We can feel many things without necessarily leaving the same place.

Perhaps this is one of the ways words begin to trap us.

But words can also expand the search space

If a familiar word can quickly return us to a learned pathway, perhaps a word that we cannot immediately translate can do something different.

In the conceptual framework we are developing in this series, we may provisionally call some of these words primal terms.

"Primal" here does not mean primitive, purer, or more truthful. Nor is it a technical concept from evolutionary computation.

It is a tool for thinking about words that enter our semantic space before they have been completely absorbed by the categories we already master.

Latin America offers extraordinary possibilities.

Në ropë.

Weichö.

Yãy hã mĩy.

Body-Territory.

In the exhibition Indigenous Worlds, these concepts were chosen by Yanomami, Ye'kwana, Tikmu'un/Maxakali, and Xakriabá curators themselves. Në ropë appears in relation to the richness that allows the earth to sprout and nourish; weichö to the singularity of ways of life; Body-Territory to the relationship in which the land is in the body and the body is in the land; yãy hã mĩy to the transformations that move through the flow of time.

The catalogue itself offers an important recommendation: approach these worlds without immediately translating them into what we already know.

That may be almost a methodology for escaping semantic local optima.

Do not translate too quickly.

Jiwasa: a word can change who fits inside "we"

We can add another window:

Jiwasa.

Aymara contains an inclusive pronominal distinction that does not appear in exactly the same way in Portuguese or English. Linguistic sources from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés describe jiwasa as an inclusive "we," involving both speaker and listener - "you and I," with or without others. A contemporary academic description of Aymara was also published by Matt Coler in 2024 in The Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes.

We do not need to conclude that this linguistic structure automatically makes Aymara speakers more collective. That would be linguistic determinism.

We can do something more interesting.

Ask:

When I say "we," are you inside it?

In English and Portuguese, we often need to recover that information from context.

Jiwasa makes the inclusion of the interlocutor linguistically more explicit.

A word has not simply given us another name.

It has opened another question.

Tekoha: where does what we call "inside" end?

Now we can encounter another word from the Americas:

Tekoha.

For Guarani and Kaiowá peoples, tekoha is not simply a translation of "territory." Recent research shows its relationship with place of existence, ways of living, health, memory, forest, and community continuity. In a 2023 study on Kaiowá and Guarani health and struggle, tekoha appears as a vital dimension of cosmopolitics and of the possibility of living well; other recent studies show the forest and its diversity as constitutive of tekoha. (Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão)

At BrainLatam, we make a deliberate conceptual extension of this term.

We call Tekoha extended interoception.

We are not claiming that this is the Guarani translation of interoception.

We are asking:

if neuroscience calls the perception of the organism's internal states "interoception," how much of that "inside" was constructed through food, water, rhythms, relationships, territory, fear, safety, and lived habits?

In the BrainLatam formulation, Tekoha attempts to keep these relationships visible.

APUS: where does our bodily position end?

We can make a complementary movement with APUS.

In the Andes, apu has its own genealogy, connected with mountains and with sacred, territorial, and social relationships constructed around them. Archaeological research published in 2023 showed that Cerro Llamocca in southern Peru functioned for millennia as a place of habitation, economic activity, ritual, and social centrality, explicitly discussing its condition as a sacred mountain or apu. (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports)

Once again, our use is an extension, not a translation.

At BrainLatam, we use APUS as extended proprioception: not only "where is my arm?" but how the Body-Territory perceives reach, direction, posture, distance, and possibilities for action within lived space.

We can then experiment with a circuit:

word -> Tekoha -> APUS -> possible action

Someone says:

"Danger."

The chest may change.

Breathing changes.

Space changes too.

The door becomes relevant.

The distance to another person gains importance.

The body reorganizes where it is and what it can do.

A single word has participated in a reorganization of both inside and outside.

Words as doors and windows

Now we can return to the beginning.

"Family."

"Homeland."

"God."

"Failure."

"Communism."

"Science."

These words are not enemies.

We need them to think, share experiences, construct histories, and act together.

But they may become so efficient at returning us to familiar pathways that we stop noticing how much of the world has remained outside them.

At that point, perhaps another word can function like a mutation.

Jiwasa.

Tekoha.

APUS.

Yãy hã mĩy.

Në ropë.

Not because Amerindian knowledge offers magical answers.

But because it can prevent a neuroscience built inside particular categories from confusing its own words with the limits of human experience.

A Decolonial Neuroscience may begin precisely here:

not merely by including different bodies in our experiments, but by allowing other knowledge systems to change the questions we bring into the experiment.

Words can then perform two movements.

They can be doors, through which we quickly return to worlds we have already learned.

And they can be windows, through which we notice that our local optimum was never the entire space of possibilities.

Perhaps escaping the words that trap us does not require abandoning words.

Perhaps it requires preserving some words that can still make us search.

And our question remains:

When a word touches me, am I encountering the world again, or am I returning to a path my Body-Territory has learned?

Perhaps freedom begins when we can still notice the difference.

References

IBÁÑEZ, Agustín et al. Ecological Meanings: A Consensus Paper on Individual Differences and Contextual Influences in Embodied Language. Journal of Cognition, 2023.

ZHANG, Kai; LI, Jiaxin; GU, Feng. Processing of emotional connotations in Chinese monomorphic and compound words reflected by the early posterior negativity. Frontiers in Psychology, 2024.

GAO, F. et al. Shared and distinct neural correlates of first and second language morphological and semantic processing. npj Science of Learning, 2023.

COLER, Matt. Aymara. In: The Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes. Oxford Academic, 2024.

FARIA, L. L. et al. "Terra é Vida, Despejo é Morte": Saúde e Luta Kaiowá e Guarani. Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão, 2023.

PAVÃO, S. et al. Memórias bioculturais dos Guarani-Kaiowá sobre a floresta e os seres que a coabitam. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, 2023.

MADER, Christian et al. In the land of the apu: Cerro Llamocca as a sacred mountain and central place in the pre-Columbian Andes of southern Peru. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2023.

GOMES, Ana Maria R. et al. (eds.). Mundos Indígenas. Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG, 2020. Retained as a primary source because the concepts presented in the exhibition were selected and developed by the Indigenous curators themselves.

CIONEK, Jackson. Tekoha y APUS - Interocepción y propiocepción más allá del vocabulario colonial. BrainLatam, 2026. Reference for the BrainLatam conceptual extension, explicitly distinguished from the original Indigenous meanings.