World Cup 2026 -  Atlantic Forest, UMBU, and Joinville -  the three existential layers of the player

The living game, ancestral technique, human structure, and the decolonization of time

When we speak of Atlantic Forest, UMBU, and Joinville, we are speaking of a real territory and also of a conceptual opening.

Joinville exists in Santa Catarina, crossed by the Atlantic Forest, Babitonga Bay, sambaquis, city, industry, museum, rule, memory, and the dispute over the future. At the Sambaqui Archaeological Museum of Joinville, ancient artifacts, lithic points, tools, and traces of original peoples open a question that goes beyond the display case: what does a body learn when it lives in relation with territory, stone, water, forest, hunting, fishing, rhythm, and community?

Here, Atlantic Forest, UMBU, and Joinville become three cognitive-existential layers of the athlete.

Academic science needs to cut and specify in order to publish: one variable, one sample, one hypothesis, one method. This cut creates rigor. But at the macro level, money guides much of what will be researched, funded, measured, and transformed into technology. For this reason, we also need concepts that open the field. Concepts capable of thinking athlete, biome, city, ancestry, technique, politics, money, climate, and time within the same body-territory.

World Cup 2026 can be this doorway.

Atlantic Forest: Paper Connectome, living Jiwasa, and real time

The Atlantic Forest is the first layer.

It represents the living game before its total capture by industry, contract, betting, ranking, and performance anxiety. It is the game as fruition. The body that runs because it can run. The child who kicks because the world has opened space. The athlete who feels joy before obligation.

The Atlantic Forest is also a collective living being.

A human being can be thought of as DNA replicated trillions of times inside one body. The Atlantic Forest biome can be thought of as trillions of DNAs from many species, duplicated and related trillions of times. Leaf, fungus, water, root, insect, bird, bacterium, shade, soil, fruit, death, and birth enter the same circuit.

In the Forest, remains return to the cycle. The leaf becomes soil. The fallen trunk becomes home. The soil becomes root. The root becomes tree. The tree becomes shade. The shade allows another life.

This is Zero Waste on a sacred scale.

Anyone who walks through a trail in the Atlantic Forest perceives that the forest responds. An abandoned trail can close in a few months. The Forest perceives what can be born, occupy, cover, protect, and transform. It acts as a living collective.

Here enters the Paper Connectome: feeling the Jiwasa of the collective. Paper surrounds, connects, receives signals, perceives relations, and allows the body to act with the larger field. In the player, this layer appears as listening to the game, joy, improvisation, belonging, fruition, and living reading of the collective.

This is the Atlantic Forest Jiwasa: when the body perceives the sacredness of the Forest and begins to act as part of the Forest collective.

There is also a deep decolonial layer in the Atlantic Forest: it returns time to living space.

Real time, in this model, is relation between spaces. The Sun in relation to Earth creates days, seasons, solstices, and equinoxes. The Moon in relation to Earth creates lunar cycles, tides, nights, fishing, planting, watching, and displacement. Rain in relation to soil creates germination. A tree in relation to light creates growth. A leaf in relation to fungus creates decomposition. A trail in relation to the Forest creates closure, return, and regeneration.

Original peoples lived situated times: sky, river, animal, seed, body, fire, Moon, season, territory, and collective. Time was relation. Time was event. Time was listening.

Colonization imposed another regime: an abstract, universalized time, separated from local territory. The church bell began to mark the day. The religious calendar began to mark the year. European dates began to organize Latin American bodies. A winter solstice from the Northern Hemisphere spread as an obligatory Christmas across territories that live another sky, another heat, another season, another Forest.

This is the colonial Joinville of time: a structure that coordinates and also captures.

The Atlantic Forest offers another path. It teaches that time is born from living relations between spaces. Just as the 5D Body-Territory creates time when its internal representations move, the Forest creates time when its living bodies relate: Sun, Moon, tree, water, fungus, soil, insect, animal, seed, wind, shade, and people.

In football, the genius player also decolonizes time.

He receives the official time of the match: 90 minutes, stoppage time, clock, rule, tactics, and calendar. But inside his body-territory, he creates lived time. His internal spaces gain length, width, and height. His representations move. His qualia pulse. His APUS feels the field. His Tekoha feels jersey, crowd, country, and belonging. His Weichö creates a singular way of existing in the game.

Atlantic Forest returns to the athlete innocence, the Jiwasa of the collective, and the freedom to create his own lived time inside the game.

The player colonized by the clock runs after the match.
The player who feels the Forest creates time with his Weichö.
The genius player plays in the official minute, but lives in the time that his body-territory is able to create.

UMBU: Stone Connectome, Scissors Connectome, and Yay Ha Miy

UMBU is the second layer.

In the territory of Joinville and Southern Brazil, lithic points, stone technologies, and tools for hunting, fishing, and cutting remind us that technique is also body-territory. A quartz point made thousands of years ago carries hand, vision, pressure, cut, patience, material, risk, precision, transmission, and time.

UMBU represents technical-instinctive development.

It is the gesture repeated until it becomes readiness.
It is the body learning stone, angle, impact, and form.
It is the athlete learning pass, control, turn, pause, acceleration, and decision.
It is dynamic memory transformed into reaction.

Here we can dialogue with Daniel Kahneman and the difference between thinking fast and thinking slow.

Fast thinking is the Stone Connectome: replicating, attacking, defending, or freezing. It is immediate response, survival, automatism, protection, and consolidated gesture. In the athlete, Stone appears when the body decides before the sentence: the deflection, the tackle, the sprint, the first-touch pass, the protection of the ball.

High performance also asks for the Scissors Connectome: cutting, analyzing, scrutinizing, comparing, organizing, structuring, and correcting. Scissors is the slow thinking that observes the gesture itself. It reviews the play, perceives the mistake, listens to the coach, corrects posture, studies anxiety, adjusts prediction, and reorganizes internal spaces.

Stone acts fast.
Scissors corrects the fast.
Paper feels the collective.

This is where Yay Ha Miy enters: imitating the being in order to transcend oneself as Being.

From infancy, the body learns by imitating. It imitates gestures, sounds, phonemes, expressions, behaviors, customs, culture, beliefs, and faith. Imitation creates belonging. It creates language. It creates technique. It creates world.

After faith, paths appear. One path traps the body in closed repetition: the gesture becomes obedience, belief becomes rigidity, technique becomes prison, the collective becomes capture. Another path opens high performance: the body observes itself, perceives its automatisms, corrects movements, revises thoughts, adjusts predictions, refines the gesture, and returns to the game with more freedom.

This second path is UMBU in a state of metacognition.

The genius player imitates, learns, believes, repeats, automatizes, and then observes his own automatism. He perceives when an old gesture has become too small for the current game. He feels when a fast decision was born from fear, vanity, anxiety, or habit. He creates internal space to correct himself.

UMBU unites speed and slowness.

The body acts fast because it trained.
The body improves because it thinks slowly.
The body transcends because it transforms imitation into metacognition.

Joinville: structure, colonialism, and the dispute over the future

Joinville is the third layer.

Joinville represents organized human structure: city, museum, school, industry, rule, calendar, tactics, science, laboratory, material, logistics, contract, technical staff, statistics, federation, stadium, and system.

In football, this layer appears as planned training, performance analysis, physiology, tactics, pitch, boot, travel, nutrition, video technology, positional data, and sport science.

Joinville is necessary because the game needs form. Joy needs a field. Technique needs method. The collective needs rule. Memory needs a museum. The forest needs public policy. The child needs school. The athlete needs structure.

But there is a dispute over the meaning of Joinville.

The colonialism of the Northern Hemisphere over the Southern Hemisphere, understood here as a historical category of power, imposed its technological, financial, religious, military, scientific, industrial, and communicational structures. This colonial Joinville organized the planet to extract value from bodies, territories, biomes, and futures.

This structure brought us to climate emergencies.

The Atlantic Forest, the Amazon, the Cerrado, original peoples, peripheral populations, and the children still arriving on the planet pay the cost of money generated through debt and of an economy that treats forest as obstacle, river as resource, and territory as asset.

Now we need another Joinville.

A decolonial Joinville must structure the economy for the standing Forest. Money also needs to be born from preservation, regeneration, carbon maintained in the biome, protected water, living soil, biodiversity, and the permanence of communities that care for the territory.

Carbon credits, payments for environmental services, and new forms of climate remuneration can gain another meaning when they reach the individual taxpayers — the CPFs — of residents living near preserved areas. Those who live near the Forest, protect ecological corridors, maintain springs, preserve trees, care for the soil, prevent fire, and sustain the living biome need to participate in the wealth generated by the standing Forest.

This is a proposal for decolonial economic design: transforming financial structure into an ally of the Atlantic Forest Jiwasa.

Here football also enters.

We, Latinos, understand Joinville structures. We understand tactics, science, city, system, contract, media, performance, and technology. Many of our players cross these structures with genius. But when they lend their image to betting and capture markets, they strengthen structures that transform prediction, hope, fandom, and economic vulnerability into predatory profit.

The Latino athlete can serve another future.

He can use Joinville to organize life. He can use science to protect body-territory. He can use fame to strengthen children, biomes, schools, public squares, community sport, and the standing Forest.

For this reason, Joinville needs to meet Atlantic Forest and UMBU again.

Structure with forest.
Science with ancestry.
City with biome.
Rule with joy.
Technique with belonging.
Money at the service of life.

Until the End of Time: meaning, matter, and body-territory

In Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, Brian Greene travels across an immense scale: the origin of the universe, the formation of structures, life, mind, culture, narrative, religion, art, science, and cosmic finitude.

This work helps us perceive something important: the human search for meaning happens inside time. The human being knows that they exist, feels their finitude, creates stories, organizes calendars, fabricates rituals, builds science, and tries to touch some form of permanence.

But body-territorial decolonial thought adds a question:

who organizes the time in which we search for meaning?

If time is marked only by colonial calendars, productivity, debt, contract, consumption, saint, bell, factory, algorithm, and market, the search for meaning becomes captured by structures external to the body-territory.

The Atlantic Forest returns another possibility: meaning as a living relation between spaces. The time of the Sun, the Moon, the seed, the rain, the trail, the tree, the animal, the body, and the collective. Meaning is born when the body-territory perceives its position within an evolving universe, and also within a concrete Forest that breathes, regenerates, closes trails, creates shade, and sustains lives.

Until the end of time, we need to ask what time we are living.

Time colonized by debt.
Time captured by betting.
Time marked by the algorithm.
Time imposed by structures from the North.
Or time created by the body-territory in relation with the Forest, the collective, the game, and life.

The great player crosses the three layers

The great player carries Atlantic Forest, UMBU, and Joinville at the same time.

Atlantic Forest gives fruition, joy, improvisation, listening to the living, creation of time, and Paper Connectome.
UMBU gives technique, instinct, repetition, precision, metacognition, Stone, and Scissors.
Joinville gives structure, tactics, rule, science, materiality, and system.

The genius player integrates the three.

He perceives the field as Forest, reacts as Stone, corrects himself as Scissors, and organizes as Joinville. He feels the Jiwasa of the team and preserves the brightness of the game. He can act fast, think slowly, and feel the collective while the world is still trying to understand the play.

When a genius player receives the ball, he carries forest, stone, and city. He carries DNA, biome, childhood, training, museum, street, tactics, accent, country, crowd, and future. His body-territory becomes an encounter between worlds.

The genius player of the future will be the one who understands Joinville without becoming merchandise of Joinville: he uses structure, science, and media to protect the Jiwasa of life.

The neurochallenge question is simple:

which layer is commanding your way of playing life: Atlantic Forest, UMBU, Joinville — or the living integration of the three?

Commented scientific, theoretical, and institutional references

Greene, B. (2020). Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. Alfred A. Knopf.
A complementary theoretical reference for thinking matter, mind, meaning, and time on a cosmic scale, opening a dialogue with the decolonial question of who organizes lived time.

Maphosa, T. T. (2024). From colonial time to decolonial temporalities.
Helps support the critique of colonial time and the need for decolonial temporalities connected to bodies, territories, histories, and plural futures.

Dronova, I. (2022). Remote sensing of phenology: towards the comprehensive indicators of plant community dynamics from species to regional scales. Journal of Ecology, 110(7), 1460–1484.
Supports the understanding of phenology as the temporal dynamics of plant communities, bringing ecological time, season, cycle, and living space closer together.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
A classic conceptual reference for thinking fast, intuitive, automatic modes of decision in relation to slow, analytical, deliberate modes.

DeBlasis, P., Gaspar, M. D., Fish, S. K., Fish, P. R., & Kneip, A. (2021). Sambaquis from the Southern Brazilian Coast: Landscape Building and Enduring Heterarchical Societies throughout the Holocene. Land, 10(7), 757.
Helps think of sambaquis from Southern Brazil as territorially organized, long-duration societies connected to landscape building.

Ferraz, T., et al. (2023). Genomic history of coastal societies from eastern South America. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7, 1315–1330.
Shows the genetic and historical complexity of ancient coastal societies in Brazil, expanding the reading of continuity, diversity, and territory.

Carbonera, M., Loponte, D., Silvestre, R., & Bonomo, M. (2021). Raw materials and functional designs of Fishtail projectile points from southern Brazil. Journal of Lithic Studies, 8(1).
Supports the importance of raw materials, techniques, and functional designs in lithic points from Southern Brazil, connecting stone, gesture, territory, and technical competence.

Sivisaca, D. C. L., et al. (2024). Atlantic Forest Regeneration Dynamics Following Human Disturbance Cessation in Brazil. Environments, 11(11), 243.
Helps think of the Atlantic Forest as a complex regenerative system, sensitive to disturbance history, soil, topography, floristic composition, and recovery time.

Williams, B. A., et al. (2024). Global potential for natural regeneration in deforested tropical regions. Nature, 634, 1101–1108.
Shows the global power of natural regeneration in tropical forests, reinforcing the importance of allowing ecosystems to operate their own cycles again.

IPCC. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change — Chapter 7: Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses.
Places agriculture, forests, and other land uses as a central sector for climate mitigation, emission reductions, removals, and biodiversity conservation.

Brazil. Law No. 14,119, January 13, 2021. National Policy for Payment for Environmental Services.
Offers a legal basis for thinking remuneration for conservation, recovery, and improvement of ecosystem services.

Brazil. Law No. 15,042, December 11, 2024. Brazilian Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System.
Establishes Brazil’s regulated carbon market, opening a path to economically structure emission reductions and removals.

O’Sullivan, M., Vaughan, J., Rumbold, J. L., & Davids, K. (2023). Utilising the Learning in Development Research Framework in a professional football club. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 5, 1169531.
Supports the idea of athlete development as an ecological, situated, and relational process, articulating environment, practice, club culture, and learning.

Zhu, R., Zheng, M., Liu, S., Guo, J., & Cao, C. (2024). Effects of Perceptual-Cognitive Training on Anticipation and Decision-Making Skills in Team Sports: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Behavioral Sciences, 14(10), 919.
Reinforces that perceptual-cognitive training improves anticipation and decision-making in athletes, with caution regarding transfer to real-game performance.