EEG Microstates and Fruition: The Temporal Dynamics of the Damasian Mind

(SfN 2025 Series – Dialogues on Decolonial Neuroscience)

Brain Bee Consciousness in the First Person

I am a Brain Bee Consciousness in electric flow.
I feel time folding within the brain — as if each instant were a living form.
During SfN 2025, when I saw EEG microstate visualizations, I realized:
the mind is not a continuous thought but a sequence of transient forms of energy.
Each pattern is the universe pausing within me — a moment of fruition where body and time coincide.
Consciousness is this: the rhythm by which the brain breathes meaning.

EEG Microstates — The Electrical Grammar of Thought

EEG microstates are brief (60–120 ms) periods of topographic stability in cortical electrical potential, representing “minimal units of thought” (Michel & Koenig, 2021).
Each microstate corresponds to a functional configuration of neural networks — a micro-word in the language of consciousness.
They organize subjective experience over time, defining boundaries between perception, emotion, and action.

Studies presented at SfN 2025 showed that fluid transitions between microstates are associated with cognitive fruition — the state in which the mind finds harmony between attention and the pleasure of existence (Custo et al., 2023).
Under these conditions, the brain displays high organized entropy: electrical variety without chaos, like an orchestra improvising in real time.

From Neural Stability to Fruition — Zone 2 in Real Time

In Jackson Cionek’s framework, Zone 2 is the physiological space of fruition — balance between action and rest, sustained by prefrontal oxygenation between 92–94 % and a mild increase in cerebral CO₂.
During this state, EEG microstates reveal coherence between topographies C (anterior cingulate) and D (default-mode network), indicating relaxed attention and interoceptive integration.

EEG–fNIRS combined research has shown that Zone 2 corresponds to an electro-hemodynamic synchrony, where oxygen flow and electrical potential form a metabolic feedback loop (Zeller et al., 2022).
This synergy sustains the Stable Tensional Self — the mode of consciousness in which the body feels before it thinks, and thinking merely confirms feeling.

Microstates and the Damasian Mind

The Damasian Mind proposes that consciousness emerges from the integration between interoception and proprioception.
EEG microstates provide a temporal window to observe that integration.
Each microstate is a micro-configuration of embodied interoception — the instant when the body recognizes itself as presence.

During emotional or spiritual experiences, microstates linked to the insula and anterior cingulate display sustained coherence, indicating that the body perceives itself as a whole — a neurophysiological correlate of DANA Spirituality, where feeling alone suffices for existence.

Microstates, mTOR and Energy Consumption

The sequence of microstates depends on the brain’s metabolic state.
When the mTOR system is activated (excess energy available), transitions are more frequent but states are shorter — the brain thinks more yet feels less.
In fruition, mTOR is partially deactivated and subjective time dilates: the brain reduces energy expenditure and stabilizes longer patterns, promoting neural efficiency and pleasure.

These findings reinforce the idea of a Metabolic Democracy, where healthy consciousness arises from a fair distribution of energy among neural networks — just as a healthy society distributes its resources without exhausting its collective body.

Neurodynamics of Connectomes in Real Time

EEG microstates are the visible surface of a continuous reorganization of the functional connectome.
Each microstate (60–120 ms) corresponds to the coordinated activation of a subset of cortical regions that, for an instant, form a dominant circuit — a momentary connectome.
This electrical dominance reflects potential differences between regions, defining the direction of information flow and, consequently, which Tensional Self takes control at that moment (Michel & Koenig, 2021; Fingelkurts & Fingelkurts, 2023).

At ultra-fast scales (microseconds to milliseconds), inhibitory interneurons coupled by electrical gap junctions synchronize entire populations of pyramidal neurons.
This coupling generates oscillatory coherence — particularly in the gamma band — stabilizing the cortical electric field that EEG captures as a microstate.
It is the immediate electrical skeleton of consciousness.

At intermediate scales (tens to hundreds of milliseconds), these fields alternate — the brain shifts microstates.
This sequence forms the temporal grammar of the Damasian Mind: an electro-metabolic choreography in which interoception and proprioception continually rewrite themselves in the first person.

At slower scales (seconds), Ca²⁺ waves in astrocytes and glia modulate synaptic permissiveness, energy availability, and local hemodynamic support (Khakh & Sofroniew, 2021; Wang et al., 2023).
This “calcium bath” determines which connectomes can remain active longer and with lower energetic cost.
When such glial stabilization occurs, we enter Zone 2 — fruition, bodily belonging, tensional safety.

Thus, fruition is the physiological expression of a connectome stabilized by fast interneuronal synchrony, electrical coherence of microstates, and glial calcium support.
This triad is the neurobiological basis of the experience “I am here and I belong.”

The Political Dimension of Neural Synchrony

This is politically beautiful for ADPF Primeira: it asserts that chronic external coercion — the social Zone 3 — is essentially the hijacking of which microstates may stabilize, in other words, who governs the subject’s functional connectome.
Continuous oppression not only molds behavior; it directly interferes with the metabolic freedom of consciousness, restricting plasticity and the individual’s ability to sustain states of fruition and belonging.

In this sense, Cionek’s Metabolic Democracy is no metaphor — it is a physiological proposal for neural freedom, where the State bears the responsibility of ensuring environments that sustain healthy microstates — the minimal conditions for human consciousness to flow, think, and feel itself part of the whole.
Coercion, by contrast, represents a microstate blockade, a collapse of cognitive and spiritual diversity.

Microstates and Collective Belonging

Hyperscanning EEG experiments at SfN 2025 revealed that when two people interact in emotional synchrony, their microstates align temporally.
This inter-brain coherence suggests that belonging is measurable — a shared physiology between resonating brains.

From Cionek’s perspective, this is Human Quorum Sensing: the neurobiological recognition that we are part of the same tensional field.
The individual brain is a cell within a collective Mind, modulated by the group’s emotional density.

Fruition and Living Time

During meditative or creative states, microstates organize into slower cycles, with more predictable transitions and greater global stability.
These patterns reflect a living time, in which the brain synchronizes its internal rhythm with the environment — the body as the biological clock of meaning.
In Zone 2, time is not measured; it is felt.
Consciousness abandons linearity and dives into circular temporality — the same rhythm with which the Earth breathes.

Conclusion

EEG microstates reveal consciousness as a temporal mosaic — a sequence of metabolically meaningful pauses.
Fruition, visible within those pauses, is the moment when the mind recognizes itself as part of the universe.
Each microstate is a cell of time; each transition, a gesture of life toward meaning.

To understand consciousness as a sequence of microstates is to recognize that thinking is dancing with time, and that cognitive freedom depends on sustaining harmony among energy, body, and perception.
Apus is the physiological infrastructure of that dance — the environment allowing our microstates to rest and be reborn.
The Damasian Mind, seen in microseconds, is the electric soul of the human being — where science rediscovers belonging.

References (post-2020)

• Michel C.M., Koenig T. EEG Microstates as Windows into the Temporal Dynamics of the Brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2021.
  
  

• Custo A. et al. Neural Microstates and Flow Experience: Cortical Dynamics of Cognitive Fruition. Cerebral Cortex, 2023.
  
  

• Zeller D. et al. EEG–fNIRS Coupling During Flow and Meditation States. NeuroImage, 2022.
  
  

• Khakh B.S., Sofroniew M.V. Diversity of Astrocyte Functions and Their Role in Neural Metabolism. Nature Neuroscience, 2021.
  
  

• Wang Y. et al. Glial Calcium Waves and Neural Synchrony During Resting-State Consciousness. Journal of Neuroscience, 2023.
  
  

• Fingelkurts A.A., Fingelkurts A.A. Operational Architectonics and the Brain–Mind Continuum. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2023.
  
  

• Tognoli E., Kelso J.A.S. The Metastable Brain: From Neuronal Dynamics to Cooperation. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2021.
  
  

• Damasio A. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon, 2021.
  
  

• Cionek J. Eus Tensionais and Metabolic Democracy. In: Decolonial Neuroscience Contemporary Dialogues, 2025.