APUS and Tekoha - How the World Enters the Body and the Body Returns to the World

Where does our body end?

Let us imagine a child entering a classroom for the first time.

Before understanding the teacher’s words, their feet search for support. Their eyes calculate distances. Their body perceives the height of the chair, the proximity of other people, the intensity of the light, the noise, and the possibilities for movement. At the same time, breathing changes, the heart accelerates or slows down, the stomach contracts, and a sensation arises that may not yet have a name.

Does all this happen inside the child, or between the child and the classroom?

Colonial education often separates before it explains: body and environment, reason and emotion, subject and object, inside and outside. The NeuroEducation of Weichö proposes temporarily suspending these divisions so that we can observe the whole movement.

How do spaces, objects, relationships, and technologies become part of the organization of a Body-Territory?

Two windows, not two translations

In this series, we use Tekoha as a window through which to ask about the territory experienced from within: breathing, heartbeat, hunger, temperature, tension, relief, fatigue, and other bodily manifestations that neuroscience partially investigates through the concept of interoception.

We use APUS to open questions about the incorporated external territory: posture, direction, balance, reach, movement, tools, and possibilities for action.

But this approximation must be constructed carefully:

Tekoha is not an Indigenous translation of interoception, just as APUS is not a translation of proprioception.

They are conceptual windows provisionally used by BrainLatam to question the limits of available scientific categories. Indigenous concepts should not be removed from their peoples and transformed merely into alternative names for Western theories.

The Indigenous Worlds exhibition, created by UFMG with Yanomami, Ye’kwana, Xakriabá, Tikmũ’ũn, and Pataxoop curators, proposes approaching these worlds on their own terms, without immediately translating them into what we already know.

The question is not which word should replace the other.

The question is:

What do we begin to perceive when a new word disrupts our previous divisions?

Tekoha: the territory that manifests from within

Interoception involves the detection, integration, and interpretation of signals related to the state of the body. It is not limited to consciously perceiving the heartbeat. It includes processes associated with breathing, temperature, pain, hunger, thirst, visceral activity, and physiological regulation.

A review published in 2024 shows that bodily awareness emerges from the integration of interoception, proprioception, touch, vision, and other sensory information. This means that feeling the body is not the same as consulting a perfectly objective internal instrument.

An accelerated heartbeat may be experienced as fear, excitement, physical effort, or a sign of illness, depending on the person’s context, history, and expectations.

Let us think about a student before an exam.

Their breathing becomes shallow. Their shoulders rise. Pressure appears in the chest. Attention begins to focus on possible threats: making a mistake, being judged, disappointing the family, or not understanding the questions.

The school may record only:

“The student was unable to concentrate.”

But together we can ask:

Was the difficulty located in the content, in the student’s ability, or in a Tekoha occupied with protecting the Body-Territory?

This does not mean that we can diagnose an emotion by observing breathing. Bodily signals are ambiguous. They need to encounter first-person consciousness:

• What did you perceive?

• What happened before?

• Does this interpretation represent your experience?

• Did the environment allow you to feel safe?

APUS: the space that the body learns to incorporate

Proprioception participates in the conscious and unconscious perception of bodily position and movement. It allows us to adjust a hand without continuously looking at it, control force, maintain balance, and coordinate actions.

But the space around the body is not a fixed geometry either.

Neuroscience uses the concept of peripersonal space to investigate the region close to the body in which we can reach objects or be reached by them. This space combines visual, tactile, auditory, and motor information and changes according to movement, experience, threat, and social interaction.

When we use a tool, something important may happen.

A pencil, hammer, walking stick, bicycle, or phone ceases to be only an external object. During action, the body reorganizes calculations of reach, precision, and possibility around these tools.

A study published in 2024 showed that tool training in virtual reality can modify measurements of peripersonal space. This does not prove that the tool literally becomes an anatomical part of the body. It does show, however, that our functional boundaries are plastic.

We may then ask:

Does a technology merely obey the body, or does it also teach the body what it can reach, perceive, and desire?

The classroom also participates in thought

An unsuitable chair changes posture. A desk that is too high creates tension in the shoulders. Noise increases the effort required to understand speech. The proximity of other people may produce belonging or defense. The distance from a screen reorganizes the eyes, the neck, and the field of attention.

The classroom is not merely a neutral container in which a mind learns.

It materially participates in the event of learning.

Embodied cognition perspectives question the idea that we first think inside the head and then use the body to execute a decision. Perception, action, language, and abstraction maintain deep relationships with sensorimotor experiences.

Embodied cognition, however, should not be presented as a total explanation either. It is an open field of investigation that helps us formulate better questions without closing the phenomenon.

Another question then arises:

How many difficulties described as cognitive may also be difficulties of posture, breathing, safety, architecture, movement, or belonging?

When APUS becomes Tekoha

Now imagine an adolescent wearing virtual reality glasses.

Their material body remains in a room, but their movements respond to another space. They lean to avoid an object that does not physically exist in the room, feel vertigo before a digital height, and react bodily to the approach of an avatar.

Where is their APUS?

In the physical room? In the virtual environment? In the coordination between the two?

The digital experience modifies posture, breathing, expectation, emotion, and memory. What initially appears as external territory may become muscular tension, an accelerated heartbeat, a habit, or an internal sensation.

In this movement, APUS participates in the formation of Tekoha.

The opposite movement also occurs. Hunger, pain, calm, fear, or fatigue modify which distances seem possible, which people may approach, and which objects attract our attention.

Tekoha reorganizes APUS.

The world participates in the organization of the body, and the state of the body modifies the world that can be perceived and inhabited.

The 5D Body-Territory

In BrainLatam’s interpretation that Consciousness Is Spatial, this circulation can be understood through a 5D Body-Territory:

• three material dimensions;

• movement;

• qualia.

The three material dimensions include the brain, the rest of the body, objects, architecture, and the people who are present.

Movement includes breathing, circulation, electrical activity, hemodynamic changes, displacement, gestures, and relational transformations.

Qualia correspond to how that event is lived in the first person: fear, trust, vertigo, familiarity, strangeness, or belonging.

This is a BrainLatam theoretical interpretation, not a conclusion directly demonstrated by the studies mentioned.

The 5D model does not intend to replace neuroscience, philosophy, or Indigenous knowledge. It seeks to provide a common table from which we can ask how matter, transformation, and experience participate in the same event.

The body as a territory of passage

Ailton Krenak invites us to abandon the idea of a humanity separated from the Earth and other beings. His thought broadens our question: perhaps the world does not enter a previously isolated body, because that body was never outside the world.

Together, we can formulate the central idea of this blog:

APUS is a window through which we observe how the Body-Territory incorporates possibilities for action in the world. Tekoha is a window through which we perceive how these relationships manifest and reorganize from within. Between them there is no fixed boundary, but a life in transformation.

Education changes when we stop asking only:

“What information entered the student’s mind?”

And begin to ask:

What space, posture, relationship, technology, and bodily experience allowed—or prevented—this knowledge from finding a place?

Perhaps some difficulties considered exclusively cognitive are also difficulties of coordination between the territory we feel from within and the world we attempt to inhabit from the outside.

Commented references

Parma, J. O. et al. (2024). An Overview of the Bodily Awareness Representation and Interoception.
The review shows that bodily awareness results from the integration of interoception, proprioception, and other sensory information, rather than from a single isolated system.

Valdes, K.; Capistran Manalang, K.; Leach, C. (2024). Proprioception: An Evidence-Based Review.
The article presents proprioception as the conscious and unconscious perception of position and movement, highlighting its importance for bodily control and its different methods of assessment.

Petrizzo, I. et al. (2024). Reshaping the Peripersonal Space in Virtual Reality.
The experiment indicates that the use of tools in virtual reality can modify measurements of peripersonal space, revealing the plasticity of the functional boundaries between body and environment.

Barrett, L.; Stout, D. (2024). Minds in Movement: Embodied Cognition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
The authors discuss how action, perception, language, and abstraction depend on bodily processes, presenting embodied cognition as an interdisciplinary program that remains open.

Angeli, A. A. C. et al. (2024). No passo Guarani: contribuições para pensar os corpos neste chão Brasil.
The article engages with Guarani specialists to question the Western separation between body and territory, showing how bodies are produced through historical, collective, and territorial relationships.

UFMG Knowledge Space (2023). Conhecendo mundos: relato de experiências e possibilidades educativas na exposição Mundos Indígenas.
The text presents an approach that avoids immediately translating Indigenous concepts into Western categories, allowing other worlds to transform the visitor’s questions.

Krenak, A. (2022). Ancestral Future.
Krenak proposes that the future depends on renewing relationships among bodies, generations, rivers, and territories, questioning the modern idea of humanity as separate from the world.