When Perception Changes, Has the World Changed - or Has Our Perspective Changed?

Brain Plasticity, the Predictive Brain, Ancestral Knowledge, and Altered States of Consciousness: A Dialogue Between Neurobucano and Latin American Decolonial Neuroscience.

1. Before Interpreting, Notice What You Experience

Observe a memory that has just emerged.

You did not need to consciously reconstruct every detail. Perhaps an image, a smell, or a sensation appeared while you were reading.

Now notice what happens when you ask yourself: does this memory correspond exactly to what I experienced?

Perhaps some details seem different.

The past event did not need to change. What changed was what you could reconstruct in the present.

What if something similar happens when we encounter a profoundly different experience?

This question connects BrainLatam with Neurobucano, where Sidarta Ribeiro, Dráulio Araújo, and Marcelo Leite discussed sleep, psychedelics, neural plasticity, and their social consequences.

Our purpose is neither to advocate for substances nor to discredit ancestral experiences.

It is to investigate how organisms construct perceptions, assign meaning, and transform their possibilities for action.

We isolate aspects of reality to understand them, not to define the entirety of Being.

2. The Body-Territory Already Imagines, Judges, and Acts

Before discussing psychedelics, we need to recognize three capacities that participate in our experience.

Imagine meeting someone you do not know.

Before the encounter, you anticipate possibilities. During the conversation, you compare expectations with events. Afterward, you may change how you act.

At BrainLatam, we relate these operations, by analogy, to the three branches of government already present within each Body-Territory.

Religion — Legislative: imagining futures, constructing expectations, and representing possibilities that have not yet been experienced.

Politics — Judiciary: interpreting events, assigning values, and judging consequences.

Science — Executive: acting, experimenting, and investigating the effects produced through encounters with the world.

These functions do not correspond to three separate brain regions, nor do they imply that every action is science or every act of imagination is institutional religion.

They are dimensions of our philosophical framework for understanding integrated experience.

In The Future That Does Not Yet Exist - Religion and the Legislative Power to Make Utopias Possible, we propose understanding the capacity to imagine futures without automatically converting them into obligatory truths.

In our conception, each Body-Territory constitutes an indivisible unit of the Jiwasa-State: it does not merely receive decisions but can participate in their construction and challenge their consequences.

3. The Predictive Brain: Perception Also Means Anticipation

You are reading this sentence before knowing how it will end.

Perhaps your brain is already anticipating possible words and meanings.

Predictive processing models investigate how expectations and sensory information continuously contribute to perception.

This does not mean that we freely invent reality.

It means that what we perceive depends on interactions among available signals, previous experiences, and models that can be updated.

At BrainLatam, we associate predictive capacities with the dimension we call Religion: imagining what does not yet exist.

But predicting is not demonstrating.

An expectation may guide our experience and still be mistaken.

Judgment allows us to question it. Action produces new consequences. Scientific investigation tests explanations.

We call this circulation Religare.

Experience does not require three separate commanders. The organism integrates processes that may cooperate, compete, and transform one another.

4. Sidarta Ribeiro: Sleep Also Transforms What We Perceive

At Neurobucano, Sidarta Ribeiro explored the relationship among sleep, psychedelics, and neural plasticity.

His research at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte investigates memory, dreaming, and learning mechanisms.

While we sleep, the brain does not stop working.

Different processes contribute to memory consolidation and reorganization. Dreams may combine elements of previous experiences into configurations that never occurred in precisely that form.

This does not demonstrate that every dream produces truthful knowledge or lasting transformation.

But it allows us to investigate how experience can be reorganized without directly corresponding to present external events.

Dreaming introduces a question that precedes psychedelics:

If we can experience worlds during sleep, how do we distinguish an event, its representation, and the meaning we assign to it?

This distinction respects subjective experience without turning its intensity into sufficient evidence of external reality.

5. Dráulio Araújo: Investigating What Changes During Experience

Dráulio Araújo and Brazilian researchers use neuroimaging to investigate the cerebral and behavioral effects of psychedelic substances.

In 2024, Tiago Arruda Sanchez and colleagues, including Dráulio Araújo, published a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of emotional regulation in experienced ayahuasca users.

Their findings identified differences associated with the processing of aversive stimuli and emotional responses.

However, changes in brain measurements do not, by themselves, demonstrate healing, transcendence, or privileged access to truth.

The effects of psychedelics depend on multiple factors, including individual characteristics, context, expectations, and conditions of support.

Psychological and physiological risks also exist, alongside important limitations in the available clinical evidence.

Brain plasticity refers to the nervous system's capacity to change. It does not necessarily mean improvement.

A transformation may be beneficial, harmful, temporary, or persistent.

We need to investigate what changed, for whom, under which conditions, and with what consequences.

6. Let It Come, Let It Stay, Let It Be

Imagine that an unexpected experience awakens fear.

You notice the sensation.

But feeling afraid does not demonstrate that the danger you imagine actually exists.

Now consider our proposal:

Let it come. Let it stay. Let it Be. You may disobey. And let it go.

In When Secularism Allows Us to Let Ourselves Be, we develop this sequence as a grammar of autonomy.

Let it come: recognize what is happening.

Let it stay: allow observation when it is safe to do so.

Let it Be: acknowledge experience without immediately imposing a definitive identity.

You may disobey: do not transform sensations, beliefs, or interpretations into obligations.

Let it go: preserve the possibility of change.

This is not a therapeutic protocol, nor a recommendation to expose oneself to distressing experiences.

It is a metacognitive reflection.

We can recognize what we feel without surrendering our capacity for judgment.

And we can learn from experience without turning our interpretation into unquestionable truth.

7. Ancestral Knowledge: Who Has the Right to Interpret?

Ayahuasca belongs to the knowledge and practices of different Amazonian Indigenous peoples, as well as Brazilian religious traditions.

Reducing it exclusively to its chemical components would disregard historical, cosmological, and communal dimensions.

Yet romanticizing these practices would also prevent us from recognizing their differences, tensions, and need for protection.

In 2023, Adana Omágua-Kambeba, Beatriz Caiuby Labate, and Sidarta Ribeiro called for an urgent dialogue between psychedelic science and Indigenous shamanism.

Such dialogue requires meaningful participation by the peoples involved, respect for traditional knowledge, and responsibility regarding the benefits produced by research.

In 2025, Ulysses Albuquerque, Romulo Alves, and Washington Ferreira Júnior examined the ethical challenges of research involving Indigenous knowledge and traditional communities.

Decolonial Neuroscience must not turn Indigenous peoples into suppliers of experiences awaiting external scientific validation.

It recognizes their participation in defining research questions, interpreting results, and deciding how knowledge will be used.

8. 5D Consciousness: When A Encounters the Possibilities of B

Return to the memory that opened our reading.

Perhaps it has acquired another meaning.

You did not need to abandon your existence to recognize a different possibility.

At BrainLatam, our proposal of 5D Consciousness explores the experience of time and transformation from the perspective of the situated organism.

Between A and B, changes may occur in perception, memory, evaluation, and possibilities for action.

Our Relational Connectomic Reserve hypothesis adds another question: could encounters with difference expand the functional resources available for future reorganization?

This has not been demonstrated by psychedelic research.

We can investigate the hypothesis while distinguishing temporary changes in brain activity from lasting neuroplasticity.

Within our philosophical framework, transcendence does not mean abandoning the body.

It means recognizing possibilities that were previously inaccessible to our interpretation.

9. Marcelo Leite: Who Judges the Transformation?

Science journalist Marcelo Leite's participation in Neurobucano adds an essential dimension: how can discoveries be communicated without turning possibilities into promises?

The so-called psychedelic renaissance involves scientific findings, therapeutic expectations, economic interests, cultural traditions, and regulatory disputes.

We need to distinguish each dimension.

Experiment → Result → Interpretation → Judgment → Decision.

DOING IS SCIENCE. JUDGING IS POLITICS.

Research can identify neurophysiological changes.

Individuals can assign meaning to their experiences.

Communities may hold their own interpretations.

And clinical or public decisions require the evaluation of evidence, risks, rights, and consequences.

None of these dimensions should erase the others.

Subjective experience can be scientifically investigated without being reduced to neural correlates, provided different methods recognize both what they can examine and what remains beyond their scope.

Perhaps you will finish this reading perceiving the world exactly as before.

Perhaps something in your interpretation has changed.

We do not need to decide that for you.

Consciousness does not have to obey every experience that arises within it. It can investigate, reinterpret, and participate in constructing new possibilities.

This is the encounter we propose between Neurobucano and Latin American Decolonial Neuroscience: a science capable of studying transformation without depriving each Body-Territory of the agency to interpret what it lives.

Scientific and Intellectual References

The references follow the article's progression: perception, prediction, plasticity, subjective experience, ancestral knowledge, and responsibility in scientific interpretation. Each includes an explanation of its specific contribution so that the references also function as an independent summary.

1. NEUROBUCANO (2024). II Seminário de Neurociências em Pernambuco. Federal University of Pernambuco and Real Hospital Português, Recife, Brazil.

The program included presentations by Sidarta Ribeiro, Dráulio Araújo, and Marcelo Leite, bringing together research on sleep, plasticity, DMT, and the social implications of psychedelics.

2. BRAINLATAM (2026). O futuro que ainda não existe - Religião e Legislativo para possibilitar utopias.

Connects the Predictive Brain with the imagination of possible futures and develops the analogy between Religion, the Legislative branch, and the capacity to formulate possibilities without converting them into obligatory truths.

3. RIBEIRO, Sidarta. Memory, Sleep and Dreams - Research Profile. Brain Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.

Sidarta Ribeiro's research integrates sleep, memory, dreaming, plasticity, and psychedelics, providing a scientific basis for investigating the reorganization of experience and its relationship with learning.

4. SANCHEZ, Tiago Arruda et al. (2024). Emotion regulation effects of Ayahuasca in experienced subjects during implicit aversive stimulation: An fMRI study. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 320, 117430.

Including Dráulio Araújo, the study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate differences associated with emotional regulation in experienced ayahuasca users, contributing to the understanding of neurobiological effects without reducing experience to measured signals.

5. BRAINLATAM (2026). Quando a laicidade permite deixar Ser.

Introduces the sequence “Let it come → Let it stay → Let it Be → You may disobey → Let it go,” emphasizing interpretive autonomy and the possibility of transforming beliefs and belonging without losing personal agency.

6. OMÁGUA-KAMBEBA, Adana; LABATE, Beatriz Caiuby; RIBEIRO, Sidarta (2023). Psychedelic science and Indigenous shamanism: an urgent dialogue. Nature Mental Health, 1, 815–816.

The authors call for a more responsible relationship between psychedelic research and Indigenous knowledge, highlighting questions of participation, cultural appropriation, and protection of traditional practices.

7. ANTUNES, Henrique Fernandes; LABATE, Beatriz Caiuby (2024). Entre saberes tradicionais, ciência e proibicionismo: contribuições da antropologia para a legitimação do uso da ayahuasca. Ponto Urbe.

The anthropologists examine how scientific research and political disputes have shaped the recognition of ayahuasca practices in Brazil, distinguishing scientific evidence, traditional knowledge, and regulatory decisions.

8. ALBUQUERQUE, Ulysses Paulino; ALVES, Romulo Romeu Nóbrega; FERREIRA JÚNIOR, Washington Soares (2025). The contemporary challenge for ethical research involving the knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities and afro-descendants and other marginalized, minority, or minoritized groups. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 21, 29.

The Brazilian researchers discuss epistemic justice, ethical responsibilities, and knowledge co-production, supporting the need for communities to participate in research involving their own knowledge systems.

9. GEARIN, Alex K. (2024). Healing with Ayahuasca the Plant Teacher: Psychedelic Metaphoricity and Polyontologies. Medical Anthropology, 43(7), 583–597.

This anthropological study examines different interpretations of ayahuasca among participants and Shipibo specialists in the Peruvian Amazon, showing how bodily experiences can acquire different ontological meanings.

10. BENEDITO, Pietro; SANABRIA, Emilia (online publication 2024). Psychedelic Nation? (De)Provincializing the Psychedelic Renaissance from Brazil. Science, Technology, & Human Values.

The authors examine Brazil's contributions to psychedelic research and challenge international narratives that underestimate Latin America's scientific, cultural, and institutional importance.

11. LEITE, Marcelo (2024). Um livro corajoso sobre meandros de luz e sombra da ayahuasca. Folha de S.Paulo, June 15, 2024.

The Brazilian science journalist discusses the complexities of ayahuasca experiences, contributing to public communication that distinguishes scientific interest from the idealization of psychedelic substances.

12. BRAINLATAM (2026). O instante em que A deixa de Ser A.

Develops BrainLatam's reflections on transformations between states of experience, connecting perception, expectation, functional reorganization, and agency without assuming that every subjective change demonstrates neuroplasticity.

BRAINLATAM | NEUROBUCANO | W46/2026 | BLOG 03/08