Feeling Is Real. But It Does Not Prove the Belief Is True

When Words Begin to Trap Us

Imagine that we are walking at night and, for a few seconds, we see a dark shape near a doorway.

The body reacts. Breathing changes. Attention narrows. Perhaps we take a step back.

"There is someone there."

A few seconds later, the light changes.

It was a coat.

Was the fear we felt false?

No.

The fear happened.

But what we explained as the cause of that fear did not correspond to what was actually in front of us.

We can take what we feel seriously without turning the feeling into automatic proof of the explanation we constructed.

The bodily experience is real as an experience.

The interpretation of its cause remains open.

And the question in this text may be the most difficult one so far:

What does my feeling confirm: the external world, or the capacity of my Body-Territory to produce that feeling?

Feeling and making a claim are not the same operation

In the previous texts, we followed a path:

experience -> feeling -> word -> sentence -> explanation -> belief

Then we saw that the path can return:

word -> memory -> expectation -> bodily organization -> feeling

Now the two movements can form a circuit.

I believe something is dangerous. A word associated with danger appears. My body responds. I feel fear. And then I conclude:

"See? I felt it. Therefore it is true."

belief -> word -> feeling -> "I felt it, therefore my belief is true"

"I am feeling afraid" attempts to describe a state.

"That person caused my fear" proposes a causal relationship.

"That person is dangerous" makes a claim about the world.

"My fear proves that person is dangerous" uses the feeling itself as evidence for the previous claim.

None of this means we should ignore fear. If a body signals threat, acting cautiously may be wise. But when there is time, we can return and ask:

What happened? What did I infer? What do I still not know?

Pain shows how an experience can be real without confirming the explanation

Research on placebo and nocebo effects offers an especially clear example.

Positive or negative expectations can alter the experience of pain. Recent reviews show that placebo and nocebo effects involve expectations, learning, and context, with consequences for both subjective experience and neurobiological processes.

In 2024, Wolf and colleagues investigated the persistence of expectations of higher and lower pain. Placebo and nocebo effects remained measurable about a week later. In EEG recordings, expectations of greater pain were associated with increased low-frequency activity during anticipation. The researchers also found that experimentally induced expectations remained relatively stable despite sensory experiences that might otherwise have encouraged their correction.

This does not mean that pain is "invented."

It means something much more useful:

what we expect can participate in what we actually feel.

If someone experiences greater pain because of a nocebo expectation, the pain does not become false. But the intensity of that pain, by itself, does not prove the explanation constructed for its origin.

Perhaps we can preserve this distinction:

A feeling can be real as an event without functioning as an automatic verifier of the cause we attribute to it.

The body does not encounter the world without a history

Argentine neuroscientist Agustín Ibáñez and Georg Northoff proposed, in 2024, a model of predictive allostatic interoception in which internal signals, the organism's temporal history, and anticipation of future needs continuously participate in bodily regulation.

The model does not claim that "everything is belief." It attempts to explain how internal perception and prediction are related to the regulation of the organism.

This helps us avoid two easy positions.

One would be to imagine that the body reveals reality directly.

The other would be to conclude that because perception involves history and prediction, there is no external reality to encounter.

We do not need either extreme.

There is a world.

There is a body.

There is history.

There are expectations.

And there is encounter.

Feeling emerges within this process.

In the language we have been developing, it is not an isolated brain that feels. It is a Body-Territory arriving at a situation carrying what it has learned before.

"Perhaps" and "it depends" are also tools

Danilo Silva Guimarães offers a particularly useful formulation.

When discussing feelings mobilized by the demands of people and their worlds, he asks what happens when we add "perhaps" and "it depends" to a simple "yes" or "no."

We enter the territory of ambiguity and ambivalence.

Perhaps we can do the same with ourselves.

"I am afraid."

Yes.

"Does this mean there is danger?"

Perhaps.

"Does that mean my fear does not matter?"

No.

We can respect the bodily event while keeping its interpretation open.

This requires a different kind of skepticism: not distrusting the feeling itself, but questioning the speed with which we transform it into a sentence about reality.

Amerindian worlds can also help us resist closing the question too early

A Decolonial Neuroscience should be careful not to replace a colonial certainty with a bodily certainty.

The catalogue Indigenous Worlds, developed through the curatorship of Yanomami, Ye'kwana, Xakriabá, Tikmu'un, and Pataxoop participants, shows that different worlds may diverge precisely around what is considered to exist, what is admissible, and what is understood as true.

It invites us to suspend immediate equivalences when we encounter concepts that do not fit our familiar schemes. At the same time, recognizing plurality does not require dissolving every distinction into relativism.

Davi Kopenawa points toward another problem: we may hear Yanomami words without actually entering the knowledge and territory from which those words emerge.

The risk is assuming that our own world already contains all the categories necessary to understand another.

This gives us an important distinction.

Different Body-Territories may produce different experiences and interpretations.

That does not make every claim equally true.

But it does make it dangerous to assume that an intense experience, by itself, can close the investigation into what exists.

And what about transcendence?

We can apply the same care to an intense experience of transcendence.

A person may feel unity, presence, dissolution of boundaries, belonging to the cosmos, or contact with something sacred.

We do not need to reduce this to "mere illusion."

The experience happened within that Body-Territory and may transform an entire life.

But its intensity, by itself, does not determine which metaphysical explanation is correct.

One person may call it God.

Another, consciousness.

Another, ancestry.

Another, a neurophysiological state.

Perhaps none of these words exhausts the event.

Recognizing this does not diminish the experience.

It may free the experience from the obligation to prove a belief.

Belonging can also feel like confirmation

Something similar happens when a narrative welcomes us.

We encounter people who use our words.

Our fears receive an explanation.

We feel relief and belonging.

All of this may be completely real as social experience.

But belonging does not automatically verify every claim made by the group.

A false narrative can produce genuine friendship.

A mistaken explanation can produce genuine relief.

A belief can reduce real tension.

Perhaps this is one reason some beliefs are so difficult to question: challenging the explanation can feel as though we are also threatening the feelings that were built within it.

And the more those feelings include safety, identity, companionship, hope, or relief, the more difficult it may become to separate the experience from the explanation that accompanied it.

We do not need to choose between the body and truth

This is a turning point in the series because we do not want to end by saying:

"Do not trust what you feel."

Nor do we want to say:

"Follow your feelings because the body knows."

Perhaps we can construct a third possibility.

Feel.

Listen.

Protect ourselves when necessary.

Name what is happening.

And keep investigating when there is room to do so.

Fear can ask us to create distance without requiring us to permanently transform someone into an enemy.

Belonging can offer companionship without requiring us to accept the entire narrative of the group.

Transcendence can transform us without having to function as metaphysical proof.

Pain can be real without explaining its own cause.

Perhaps freedom includes being able to say:

"What I am feeling is really happening within me. I am still discovering what it tells me about the world."

In this way, feeling keeps its dignity.

And reality keeps the possibility of contradicting us.

We can return to the opening question:

What does my feeling confirm?

Perhaps, before anything else, it confirms that my Body-Territory was capable of reaching that state.

What caused the state, what it means, and what we should do with it can still remain open.

This distinction may appear small, but it changes the entire circuit.

Instead of:

belief -> word -> feeling -> "I felt it, therefore it is true"

we can create a small opening:

belief -> word -> feeling -> "something happened in me" -> investigation

The feeling is not erased.

The belief does not need to be immediately destroyed.

But the circuit no longer closes upon itself.

There is still room for the world to enter.

There is still room for another person.

Another word.

Another Body-Territory.

Another explanation.

Another experience.

And perhaps this is precisely the point at which a word stops being a sentence.

And becomes a tool again.

References

GUIMARÃES, Danilo Silva. Sentimentos mobilizados diante de demandas de pessoas e seus mundos. Jornal da USP, 2025.

IBÁÑEZ, Agustín; NORTHOFF, Georg. Intrinsic timescales and predictive allostatic interoception in brain health and disease. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2024.

WOLF, M. I. et al. Differential neural activity predicts the long-term stability of placebo and nocebo effects. Scientific Reports, 2024.

FRISALDI, E. et al. Placebo and nocebo effects and mechanisms associated with pharmacological interventions. 2023.

GOMES, Ana Maria R. et al. (eds.). Mundos Indígenas. Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG, 2020. Retained as a primary Indigenous-curated source despite being published before 2021.