APUS: The Body Beyond the Skin

What if the body did not end where the skin ends, but continued into the mountain, the water, the home, the street, the forest, and the territory?

This question is at the center of the concept of APUS. In the BrainLatam2026 perspective, APUS means extended proprioception: the body’s capacity to orient itself not only through muscles, joints, posture, and movement, but also through the environment it inhabits, the bonds that sustain it, and the territory that gives meaning to existence.

Science usually defines proprioception as the perception of body position and movement. It explains how we know where our hand is even with our eyes closed, how we adjust balance while walking, and how the body organizes itself in space. But when we look from Latin America, Indigenous peoples, and body-territory thought, this definition is still too small. The body does not orient itself only within itself. It also orients itself through the world it inhabits.

We breathe differently when we enter a forest. The body relaxes before a safe landscape. Attention changes near water. Posture contracts on a violent street. A home can welcome or imprison. A mountain can function as a reference of stability. A river can organize memory, childhood, and belonging. This is not only imagination. It is the body regulating its existence through territory.

For this reason, APUS is not a metaphor. It is a way of saying that the body has maps that go beyond the skin. These maps are sensory, affective, social, and territorial. The body feels the ground it steps on, the quality of the air, the presence of others, the trust or threat of an environment, the memory of a place, and the possibility of belonging.

From the perspective of body-territory, this idea becomes stronger. Rogério Haesbaert argues that, in a Latin American reading, territory is not only an area controlled by law or the State. It involves body, land, Indigenous peoples, decolonial feminisms, and the territory-body of the Earth. In other words, territory is a space of life and r-existence, not merely property or economic resource. (Wikipedia)

APUS appears precisely in this passage: when the body stops being understood as an isolated organism and begins to be perceived as a body in continuity with territory. The human body is not a closed machine. It is a sensitive opening to the world. It feels climate, terrain, light, sound, presence, absence, threat, and care.

Recent Latin American and hemispheric references on cuerpo-territorio reinforce this view. A 2023 article connects the concept with Latin American Indigenous communitarian feminism and highlights three key concerns: colonialism is inseparable from patriarchy, violence against the body is linked to violence against land and extractivism, and human life exists in connection with land, animals, plants, and other beings. (Revista ANPHLAC)

This is decisive for APUS. When land is wounded, the body is also wounded. When water is contaminated, it is not only the environment that becomes ill; bodily, affective, and collective orientation also changes. When the forest disappears, part of a community’s extended proprioception disappears. The body loses references of world.

Colonization, in this sense, did not take only land. It cut APUS apart. Living territory was divided into papers: titles, deeds, contracts, debts, guarantees, funds, assets, and financial leverage. The mountain became property. Water became business. Forest became resource. Land became commodity. APUS was dismembered.

When this happens, the body loses the whole. It remains alive, but its orientation becomes impoverished. It begins to live in fragments: home separated from street, street separated from city, city separated from land, work separated from life, money separated from care. The person begins to feel like an “individual” as if that meant being alone. But the isolated individual is a poor invention when compared to the complexity of life.

Here, contemporary neuroscience begins to offer important clues, even if it still uses a limited language. Studies with fNIRS hyperscanning and relational neuroscience investigate how brains and bodies couple during cooperation, attachment, bonding, empathy, group interaction, and development; this work increasingly considers behavior, physiology, and social context together, not only isolated brain activity. (ScienceDirect)

The field of embodied hyperscanning goes even further by studying social interaction through simultaneous brain and body measurements. This is important because belonging is not only neural. It is respiratory, postural, cardiac, muscular, affective, and territorial. (PubMed)

Even so, a more decolonial language is still missing. Science speaks of “neural synchrony,” “inter-brain synchrony,” “social coordination,” and “ecological validity.” These terms are useful, but they still do not fully reach what APUS names: the body is not only interacting with another body; it is orienting itself inside a larger field of belonging.

When we use EEG, fNIRS, respiration, HRV/RMSSD, GSR, EMG, and body movement in multimodal studies, we can begin to measure this expanded body. We can observe how a person changes before a landscape, a song, a conversation, a circle, a classroom, a threat, or an environment of trust. But the question must change.

It is not enough to ask: what happens in the brain?
We must ask: what territory is forming this body?

It is not enough to ask: which brain area activated?
We must ask: which APUS was activated, wounded, or restored?

This shift is essential for a Decolonial Neuroscience. The brain should not be treated as an abstract organ separated from territory. It is part of a body that breathes, positions itself, defends itself, trusts, learns, and belongs. And this body is always somewhere.

APUS also helps us understand why certain environments favor creativity, fruition, and metacognition, while others push the body into defense. A welcoming territory expands the body. A violent territory contracts the body. A territory excessively privatized fragments the body. A living territory allows the body to think better.

This is why APUS is directly connected to Zone 2. When the body feels enough safety, it can reduce defense, expand attention, breathe better, perceive nuance, update beliefs, and create new possibilities. Zone 2 does not arise only inside the head. It depends on the situated body, the environment, and belonging.

In the same way, a wounded APUS can push the body into Zone 3. When a child grows up unable to trust the collective, when the city threatens, when land becomes dispute, when money organizes everything, and when territory is reduced to property, the body learns to protect itself. It narrows attention, hardens posture, and begins to live as if the world were always a threat.

The great contribution of APUS is to show that belonging is not only a beautiful idea. Belonging is bodily orientation. It is knowing where one is. It is feeling that the body has ground, bond, landscape, memory, and future. Without APUS, a person may have an address but not necessarily a territory. They may have a house but not necessarily belonging. They may have money but not necessarily a world.

For this reason, APUS is also political. If the body extends into territory, then destroying territory is destroying part of the body. If privatizing everything fragments collective experience, then politics must rebuild conditions of belonging. Education, health, safety, housing, water, forest, public squares, streets, and technology are not separate themes. All of them organize or disorganize APUS.

In the future, when we speak of DREX Cidadão, this connection becomes even clearer. If money is born only in banks, debt, and speculation, it reinforces the dismembered APUS. But if money is born in the citizen as a basic metabolism of territory, it may circulate again as minimal social energy to sustain life, care, and belonging.

APUS, therefore, is the body beyond the skin. It is the mountain felt as stability. It is water felt as continuity. It is the home felt as shelter. It is the street felt as trust or threat. It is the forest felt as expanded breathing. It is territory felt as part of consciousness itself.

We do not think despite territory.
We think with territory.

And perhaps this is one of the great tasks of Decolonial Neuroscience: to show that the body was never alone. It has always been more than skin. It has always been APUS.

References

DAMASIO, Antonio. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021.
Supports the understanding of consciousness as a bodily process grounded in organism regulation, interoception, and proprioception.

HAESBAERT, Rogério. “Do corpo-território ao território-corpo (da Terra): contribuições decoloniais.” GEOgraphia, v. 22, n. 48, 2020.
A central reference for articulating body-territory, territory-body of the Earth, Indigenous peoples, and Latin American decolonial thought.

KRENAK, Ailton. Futuro Ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
Helps frame belonging as continuity between body, river, mountain, memory, and territory.

D’ARCANGELIS, Carol Lynne; QUIROGA, Lorna. “Cuerpo-Territorio: Towards Feminist Solidarities in the Americas.” Revista Eletrônica da ANPHLAC, n. 35, 2023.
Important for connecting body-territory, Indigenous feminisms, colonialism, extractivism, and violence against land and bodies.

DE FELICE, Silvia et al. “Relational Neuroscience: Insights from Hyperscanning Research.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2025.
Proposes relational neuroscience as a field for studying dynamics between brains, attachment, cooperation, empathy, and groups.

GRASSO-CLADERA, Aitana et al. “Embodied Hyperscanning for Studying Social Interaction: A Scoping Review of Simultaneous Brain and Body Measurements.” Social Neuroscience, 2025.
Connects hyperscanning, bodily measurements, physiology, and social interaction, supporting the idea of the relational body.