FESBE 2026 — Decolonial Neuroscience - Local Optima
FESBE 2026 — Decolonial Neuroscience - Local Optima
Only Science With Evidence Can Move Us Out of Our Local Optima
Before certainty, there is a body searching for stability. Before ideology, there is a breath that found shelter in a narrative. Before “absolute truth,” there is a living system trying to reduce uncertainty, energy cost, and threat.
In BrainLatam2026, we call this a local optimum in Zone 3.
In evolutionary computation, a local optimum is a solution that seems good within a restricted neighborhood, but may prevent the system from finding better solutions in another region of the search landscape. In complex landscapes, algorithms can become trapped in local peaks when there is not enough diversity, exploration, or perturbation to escape.
BrainLatam2026 proposes a careful transposition:
bodies, groups, and societies can also become trapped in neuroaffective local optima.
The body learns a way of existing. The brain stabilizes predictions. The group confirms. The algorithm reinforces. Fear protects. Belonging rewards. Little by little, a partial position begins to feel like total truth.
In this state:
questions decrease;
certainty increases;
curiosity weakens;
structural criticism loses strength;
and people begin defending ready-made causes, often created by others.
A cultural local optimum often feels comfortable because it offers identity. It tells us who we are, who the enemies are, what we should repeat, what we should consume, whom we should vote for, and which questions we should avoid.
That is why Zone 3 can be understood as a rigid neuroaffective local optimum: there is belonging, but little inner freedom; there is collective synchrony, but low metacognition; there is a strong narrative, but little openness to new questions.
Social polarization exploits this. It stabilizes groups in predictable emotional peaks. The algorithm works as a repetition operator: it delivers more of the same, reinforces outrage, reduces cognitive diversity, rewards fast reaction, and narrows the exploration of possible worlds.
In evolutionary computation, escaping local optima requires diversity, mutation, exploration, perturbation, and new search paths. In social life, this appears as proto-solutions.
Proto-solutions are early, partial exits. At first, they may seem imperfect, strange, incomplete, or even “irrational” to those trapped in the dominant local optimum. But they matter because they increase exploratory diversity. Without proto-solutions, the system repeats the same peak.
This is where the phrase becomes powerful:
The Future Is Ancestral
Not as nostalgia. Not as a romantic return to the past. But as a neurocivilizational hypothesis:
ancestral knowledge can function as proto-solutions for escaping the local optima of colonial modernity.
The current system has stabilized bodies in consumption, speed, competition, screens, debt, fear, normative family structures, polarization, and algorithmic capture. It looks efficient inside its own local peak. But it produces anxiety, loneliness, environmental collapse, loss of meaning, youth suffering, symbolic warfare, and low collective capacity to formulate original questions.
Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, quilombola communities, body-territory knowledge, collective work, circles, singing, silence, intergenerational coexistence, community care, territorial food, non-dogmatic spirituality, and belonging to the biome can open other regions of the human possibility space.
In BrainLatam2026, this means:
ancestry with science can expand the human search space.
Science with evidence prevents ancestry from becoming dogma. It demands materiality, comparison, revision, method, and humility. At the same time, ancestry prevents science from becoming a colonial technocracy without body, territory, or belonging.
The mature path is the combination:
science with evidence + ancestral knowledge + body-territory + new questions.
When the body begins to breathe differently, sleep differently, eat differently, belong differently, move differently, listen differently, and formulate different questions, the local optimum starts to lose strength.
FESBE 2026 enters here as a fertile field of crossing: neuroscience, physiology, biological rhythms, DOHaD, metabolism, mental health, EEG, fNIRS, hyperscanning, artificial intelligence, and science education can help measure how bodies enter Zone 3 — and how they may return to Zone 2.
The question is not only “which side is right?”
The BrainLatam2026 question is:
which local optimum is organizing my body so that I defend this certainty?
A population in Zone 2 asks questions. A population in Zone 3 chooses trenches. A population with science, ancestry, and belonging can move its local optima without destroying dignity, memory, and collective meaning.
In the end, perhaps the future begins when humanity realizes that many of its certainties were only civilizational local optima — and that some exits already existed in ancestral territories we learned to ignore.
References Supporting This Text
Gabriela Ochoa et al. — Local Optima Networks, a model for mapping local optima in complex combinatorial landscapes.
Fitness Landscape / Evolutionary Computation — conceptual basis on search landscapes, local optima, and exploration of solutions.
Arturo Escobar — Designs for the Pluriverse — design, autonomy, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in Latin America as pathways toward more just and sustainable worlds.
UNESCO — Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems — Indigenous and local knowledge as contributions to climate action and adaptation.
Dorji et al. (2024) — systematic review on how Indigenous knowledge contributes to climate adaptation and resilience.
IPCC / UNESCO / UNU — integration of Indigenous and local knowledge in climate assessment and adaptation.
