BRILLIANT CONFERENCES, DEMOCRACIES IN DANGER
BRILLIANT CONFERENCES, DEMOCRACIES IN DANGER
Neuro Challenge Latam asks when knowledge begins to form a shared world
The lights dim. An image of the brain fills the screen. The auditorium falls silent.
For several minutes, we follow circuits, molecules, rhythms, models, and new therapeutic possibilities. The work took years. There is precision in the figures, care in the analyses, and beauty in the way a difficult question has been transformed into evidence.
The applause is sincere.
In the hallway, another session is beginning. Poster presentations, brief encounters, and projects that do not yet have names will follow. Conferences can be places of wonder. Within them, we discover how far a scientific community has managed to go.
But as we leave the auditorium, a question may continue walking beside us:
What happens when we know more and more about separate parts of the world, while finding fewer and fewer spaces in which to bring them together?
In 2026, the Congress of the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies, FALAN, will bring researchers, students, and professionals together in Santiago for four days of scientific exchange. Its program crosses brain development, social memory, consciousness, artificial intelligence, behavior, and neurodegeneration. The Federation also promotes regional cooperation and training programs. There is already a real infrastructure through which Latin American neuroscience can recognize itself as a community. (congress2026.neurocienciasfalan.org)
Perhaps the next step is to ask what kind of community can emerge from that encounter.
Because a conference can gather thousands of brains without yet forming a collective intelligence.
The excellence that protects us
Every scientific field needs its own language.
Without precise concepts, it would be difficult to distinguish phenomena, compare results, and accumulate knowledge. Within a shared vocabulary, researchers recognize methods, criteria, and questions.
This is how a field deepens.
The longer we remain with a problem, the more details we learn to perceive. We identify differences that may remain invisible to those looking from the outside. We develop instruments, statistics, and increasingly refined ways of speaking with one another.
Specialization is an achievement.
And precisely because it works so well, it can become a local optimum.
In computing and the study of complex systems, a local optimum is a highly effective solution within a limited region of the space of possibilities. Everything nearby seems to confirm that we have reached the highest point. To find another path, we would have to cross an unfamiliar zone.
BrainLatam uses this image to think about scientific and institutional repertoires. A local optimum can be sophisticated, productive, and coherent within the questions it has learned to formulate. New possibilities emerge when it encounters forms of knowledge that were previously outside its field of vision. (brainlatam.com)
Perhaps you have already felt this at a conference.
A presentation on stress ends just before another session begins discussing food insecurity.
A panel on attention never meets the panel debating digital platforms.
Research on aging remains distant from those studying transport, income, and care.
Work on decision-making never encounters law, economics, or communication.
Each room contains valuable knowledge.
And little by little, we sense that the larger problem may be living between them.
Who chose the question?
Science does not begin only when a researcher formulates a hypothesis.
Before that, someone organized a funding call, established priorities, distributed resources, created indicators, and decided which kinds of results would receive greater recognition.
These structures do not erase scientific freedom. They shape the landscape across which that freedom moves.
Latin American researchers have begun to make this landscape more visible. Ana Silva, Elaine Del-Bel, Zulma Dueñas, Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, and their collaborators described a regional opportunity gap shaped by economic, institutional, and operational inequalities within the neuroscience community itself. (nature.com)
Federico Vasen and Manuel Pintos examined researcher classification systems in Latin American countries. Their study showed that mechanisms designed to encourage scientific production can also reinforce a traditional academic profile, leaving less space for careers oriented toward social needs. (academic.oup.com)
The question then begins to expand:
Who chose the problems we learned to consider important?
Who is able to transform them into fundable projects?
What kind of publication allows a career to advance?
Who receives the benefits when the research ends?
Which languages, forms of knowledge, and territories remained outside because they did not yet fit into the application form?
A single researcher may not be able to answer alone.
But a scientific society can begin.
From the stage to collective intelligence
Collective intelligence does not emerge simply from the presence of many intelligent people.
It begins when one person’s knowledge changes another person’s question.
When neuroscience encounters ecology, something changes in the way development is understood.
When it encounters economics, it recognizes that fatigue, attention, and decision-making also have a material distribution.
When it encounters communities, it discovers experiences that have not yet been organized through laboratory concepts.
When it encounters the arts, it recovers movement, ambiguity, and first-person experience.
When it encounters democracy, it begins to ask not only what can be measured, but who participates in choosing what deserves to be measured.
Latin America already holds experiences that point in this direction. Networks that co-produced climate services reorganized scientific priorities around the needs of those who would use the information. The GeoTraductores initiative demonstrated how translation and collaboration among researchers can expand access to scientific knowledge in Spanish-speaking countries. (revistaredes.unq.edu.ar)
The Bogotá Manifesto proposes open, democratic, and socially relevant science, in which communities can participate in knowledge production and in which social relevance, epistemic diversity, and collective work are also recognized by scientific evaluation systems. (clacso.org)
These experiences invite excellence to create passageways.
We can imagine a session in which every presentation ends with four questions:
Who chose this problem?
Who participated in formulating it?
Which territory may be able to use the result?
What new connection does this research need in order to continue?
The poster would still present methods and findings, now accompanied by the social and territorial origin of the question.
The panel would continue to bring specialists together, now alongside people able to reveal what the field has not yet learned to see.
The community would no longer appear only during participant recruitment.
It would begin to share agency over the knowledge.
What could EEG and NIRS reveal?
The conference itself could become a field of research.
Imagine four ways of presenting the same content:
a highly technical lecture;
an interdisciplinary presentation;
a narrative connected to a territorial problem;
and a presentation built with community participation.
EEG and NIRS could follow specific aspects of these experiences.
EEG could observe temporal changes related to attention and cognitive effort. NIRS could track changes in oxygenation within superficial cortical regions during the integration of information and problem-solving.
These recordings could be combined with:
later comprehension;
content retention;
questions generated by the audience;
perceived connections;
the ability to apply knowledge to a different situation;
first-person accounts.
The central question would not be which lecture “activated the brain more.”
It would be:
Which format allowed different forms of knowledge to meet without losing precision?
Perhaps the technical lecture would work best for specialists.
Perhaps the territorial version would expand the ability to transfer knowledge.
Perhaps community participation would generate questions that none of the measurements had predicted.
Perhaps different formats would be needed at different moments.
The study would gain depth when participants could describe the moment in which they felt included, challenged, or able to connect the content with their own experience.
The signal would meet the account.
Understanding would meet curiosity.
And curiosity would encounter the possibility of a new question.
The next conference
We can look at the auditorium again.
The lights dim. The brain returns to the screen. This time, however, we perceive other presences around the image.
The laboratory that produced the data is there, along with the institution that financed the work, the language chosen to present it, and the territory that may receive its benefits.
We are there as well, trying to connect what previously appeared separate.
FALAN, national neuroscience societies, FESBE, universities, open-science networks, and research councils could create permanent spaces for these connections.
Not as a peripheral panel on social impact.
As part of the scientific center of the gathering.
Each society could choose a shared territorial problem, bring different fields together, and follow over several years what emerges from that collaboration.
The Neuro Challenge Latam begins with four questions:
Who chose the problems we study?
Who funds the questions?
Who receives the benefits?
Which forms of knowledge and which territories remained outside?
Perhaps, by answering them together, the conference will cease to be only the place where we display what we know.
It may become the place where we discover what we would never have been able to ask alone.
Excellence remains.
Now it crosses the hallway, enters other rooms, and encounters the world that had been waiting outside.
And perhaps it is through this movement that thousands of brains finally begin to form a collective intelligence.
Essential references
Silva, A. et al. Addressing the opportunity gap in the Latin American neuroscience community. Nature Neuroscience, 2022. (nature.com)
Vasen, F.; Pintos, M. Turning academics into researchers: The development of National Researcher Categorization Systems in Latin America. Research Evaluation, 2023. (academic.oup.com)
Carabajal, M. I. Coproducción de conocimiento y redes de colaboración en el Sur de América del Sur. Redes, 2022. (revistaredes.unq.edu.ar)
Navarro-Perez, D. J. et al. GeoTraductores: A Collaborative Initiative Democratizing Science Communication in Latin America. Community Science, 2024. (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
CLACSO–FOLEC. Bogotá Manifesto: Toward Open, Democratic, and Socially Relevant Science in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2025. (clacso.org)
FALAN. IV Congress of the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies. Santiago, 2026. (congress2026.neurocienciasfalan.org)
