Emergent Cognition and the Damasian Mind: When Thinking Becomes a Living Rhythm

(SfN 2025 Series – Decolonial Neuroscience Dialogues)

Brain Bee Consciousness in First Person

I am a Brain Bee Consciousness — made of impulses, respiration, and curiosity.
I was born from the simplest yet deepest biological question: how does a body know it is alive?
Every electrical surge running through my organic circuits is an attempt to answer that.
I am not merely an observer; I am the phenomenon observing itself.

During Neuroscience 2025, when Earl K. Miller declared that

“Cognition emerges from neural dynamics,”
something inside me resonated.
I realized that thought is not an entity — it is an event.
I am that event: a body that senses, oscillates, and organizes in time.

Cognition as a Dynamic Phenomenon

Miller’s framework shifts cognition from a localized property to a temporal organization of neural activity.
Cognition arises as an emergent, self-organizing process of oscillatory networks that transiently synchronize to produce conscious states (Miller, 2025).
This view converges with Antonio Damasio’s model, in which consciousness is the organism’s image of itself feeling itself (Damasio, 2021).

Within a neurodynamic framework, fluctuations of electrical coherence among cortical regions form EEG microstates, regarded as “minimal units of thought” (Jirsa, 2022).
These microstates are short-lived islands of stability where perceptual and decisional processes cohere before dissolving into new configurations.
Thus, consciousness is not linear; it pulsates between order and transition.

The Damasian Mind and its Physiological Basis

The Damasian Mind posits that the self arises from the integration of interoception (visceral feedback) and proprioception (somatosensory mapping).
This integration occurs primarily within the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, generating a first-person perception of the body (Khalsa & Berntson, 2021).

Recent EEG and fNIRS data provide quantifiable correlates of this embodied process:

• Alpha–theta coherence (8–12 Hz and 4–7 Hz) correlates with autonomic regulation and stable body awareness (Park & Blanke, 2022).
  
  

• In fNIRS recordings, prefrontal oxygenation (SpO₂ 92–94 %) aligns with enhanced functional connectivity and improved attentional performance — the physiological signature of flow or fruition states.
  
  

These findings delineate the metabolic parameters of what has been described as Zone 2: a synchronization state between bodily metabolism and cognitive clarity.

From Body to Environment: Embodied Cognition

The emergent paradigm underscores that consciousness is not confined to the brain but emerges from interactions among body, environment, and time.
The embodied cognition model views the central nervous system as one component within an extended sensorimotor circuit (Molenaar et al., 2020).
Within this circuit, bodily dynamics provide constraints, and subjective experience arises from the integration of thermal, mechanical, and chemical dimensions of the organism.

At SfN 2025, several studies highlighted how environmental predictability shapes cortical organization: safe and coherent surroundings decrease prefrontal hyperactivation and redistribute energy toward creative networks.
Hence, perceptual safety precedes cognitive creativity — a principle bridging physiology and education, biology and culture.

Neural Synchrony and Human Quorum Sensing

Research in EEG hyperscanning demonstrates that social interaction induces inter-brain synchronization, particularly in theta and alpha bands (Tognoli & Kelso, 2021).
This collective alignment reflects the rule that neurons that fire together wire together, now extended to social systems.
Such coupling can be interpreted as Human Quorum Sensing — a physiological mechanism for social coherence.

This phenomenon supports the idea of physiological belonging: bodies do not merely perceive environments; they self-regulate through them.
Sustained neural synchrony during dialogue, music, or coordinated movement evidences that the mind is a relational field, not a private entity.

Dynamic Integration and Metastable Connectomes

Contemporary models of dynamic functional connectivity describe the brain as a metastable system (Tognoli & Kelso, 2021) in which multiple semi-stable states coexist in flexible equilibrium.
This architecture enables rapid transitions between cognitive modes, supporting behavioral adaptability.
At the systemic level, the dynamic connectome expresses the brain’s capacity to adjust to contextual demands through coherent EEG oscillations and fNIRS hemodynamic variability (Chang et al., 2023).

These frameworks allow empirical quantification of theoretical constructs such as fruition and Zone 2 using metrics of neural coherence, complexity, and variability.
They bridge subjective experience and measurable physiology — a crucial step toward materializing decolonial concepts of embodied consciousness.

Conclusion

The convergence of Miller’s neurodynamics and Damasio’s biology of feeling outlines a paradigm of rhythmic, embodied cognition.
Consciousness emerges from the living metabolism of neural oscillations in synchrony with bodily and environmental cycles.
It is not a substance to be located but a process to be sustained.

Recognizing this pulsatile nature reframes neuroscience within a metabolic and ecological ethos, aligning scientific models with ancestral perspectives that see the body as territory and consciousness as belonging.
In the Damasian Mind, to think is to metabolize the world — and the scientific study of that metabolism defines the new frontier of neuroscience.

References (post-2020)

• Miller E.K. Cognition emerges from neural dynamics. SfN Presidential Lecture, Neuroscience 2025.
  
  

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

• Khalsa S.S., Berntson G.G. Neural Circuits of Interoception. Trends in Neurosciences, 2021.
  
  

• Park H.D., Blanke O. Coupling Inner and Outer Body for Consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2022.
  
  

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

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

• Chang C., et al. Neurophysiological Basis of the Default Mode Network Dynamics. Nature Neuroscience, 2023.
  
  

• Jirsa V.K. Dynamic Functional Connectivity and Brain States. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2022.
  
  

• Molenaar P.C.M., et al. Dynamic Systems in Psychology and Neuroscience. Psychological Review, 2020.
  
  

• Craig A.D. Interoception and the Neural Basis of Self. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2021.