The Brain Decides What Is Worth Pursuing. But Who Taught It What to Value?
The Brain Decides What Is Worth Pursuing. But Who Taught It What to Value?
From the neural encoding of reward to Body-Territory: a dialogue between Neuroscience, Anthropology, and Latin American Decolonial Thought.
English edition | Approximately 1,300 words, excluding references and SEO metadata.
The Brain Decides What Is Worth Pursuing. But Who Taught It What to Value?
From the neural encoding of reward to Body-Territory: a dialogue between Neuroscience, Anthropology, and Latin American Decolonial Thought.
Before Deciding, the Body Has Already Begun to Feel
Imagine encountering a food that marked your childhood. Before taking the first bite, your breathing changes, a memory emerges, and your body anticipates something pleasant. For someone else, the same food might evoke indifference or disgust.
The stimulus may be similar. The experience is not.
How does the brain learn what to seek or avoid? Where does the value we assign to an experience originate? And how much of that value has been shaped by the relationships we have lived?
These questions connect BrainLatam with Neurobucano — the Second Neuroscience Seminar in Pernambuco, held in Recife, Brazil, in November 2024, with a scientific focus on the neural mechanisms of valence and reward encoding.
We propose expanding this dialogue through Latin American Decolonial Neuroscience: investigating how the brain learns to assign value without forgetting that organisms exist within bodies, histories, cultures, and territories.
1. How Do Neurons Learn Value?
Research presented by neuroscientists Ana João Rodrigues and Carina Soares-Cunha, from the University of Minho, Portugal, addresses a fundamental experimental question: how do different neuronal populations participate in learning associated with rewarding and aversive stimuli?
In 2024, Catarina Deseyve and colleagues, including these researchers, published a study investigating neurons in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region involved in motivation and associative learning.
Using fiber photometry in mice, they examined the activity of neuronal populations associated with dopamine D1 and D2 receptors during tasks involving reward and aversion.
Their findings revealed dynamic responses across different forms of learning, challenging overly simplified interpretations that assign exclusively opposing functions to these neuronal populations.
These results help explain how organisms learn relationships between environmental signals and their consequences.
However, identifying learning mechanisms is different from understanding every meaning attributed to what has been learned.
A reward within an experimental protocol does not automatically represent everything a person considers valuable in life.
We isolate aspects of reality to understand them, not to define everything that exists.
Scientific experiments generate knowledge about real dimensions of phenomena. Problems arise when we mistake those dimensions for the whole.
2. Luiz Pessoa: The Brain Does Not Work in Isolation
Brazilian neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa, in The Entangled Brain (2022), challenges the idea that the brain consists of independent regions, each responsible for a separate psychological function.
Perception, emotion, attention, and cognition emerge through interactions among widely distributed neural circuits.
This perspective connects Neuroscience with complex systems thinking: localized activity contributes to processes shaped by networks, physiological states, and environmental conditions.
The nucleus accumbens does not disappear from this explanation. Its importance becomes clearer when we investigate its relationships with other circuits.
At BrainLatam, this understanding resonates with our exploration of the wonder of complex systems and the need to move beyond strictly localizationist explanations.
The question is no longer simply where the brain represents reward, but how different processes contribute to motivated behavior.
Yet another participant is often overlooked: the body that feels.
3. The Damasian Mind: Feeling Before Judging
António Damásio and Hanna Damásio emphasize the importance of bodily regulation and homeostatic feelings in understanding conscious experience.
Hunger, thirst, discomfort, and safety are not merely peripheral signals transmitted to the brain. They participate in the organization of an organism that must maintain the conditions necessary to remain alive.
This perspective informs what we develop at BrainLatam as the Damasian Mind.
Food may become especially attractive when we are hungry. Social interaction may feel pleasant under certain circumstances and threatening under others.
The organism's internal state changes its possibilities for perception, action, and learning.
BrainLatam extends this reflection further: when hunger results not merely from temporary physiological needs but from persistent inequality, understanding behavior also requires examining social conditions.
Neuroscience explains indispensable mechanisms. Anthropology, history, and economics help explain the circumstances in which those mechanisms operate.
4. Alfredo Pereira Jr.: Measuring Feeling Is Not Possessing Experience
Brazilian philosopher and researcher Alfredo Pereira Jr., together with Vinícius Jonas de Aguiar, proposed a scientific approach to the capacity to feel in 2023.
They distinguish Sentiomics, concerned with identifying dynamic patterns associated with sentience, from Qualiomics, which addresses the diversity of conscious qualities described from a first-person perspective.
This distinction recognizes that neural measurements and subjective reports provide different kinds of information about the same event.
At BrainLatam, we connect this discussion with the Triple-Aspect Monism proposed by Alfredo Pereira Jr., a philosophical framework considering physical, informational, and experiential aspects of an integrated reality.
We do not present this ontology as an experimentally established explanation of reward.
Instead, it helps us formulate questions that conventional protocols may not fully address.
When we observe changes in neural activity during a pleasant experience, what have we learned about the phenomenon? Which dimensions remain inaccessible to that measurement?
The screen shows a fragment of a fragment, not the entire organism.
5. Arturo Escobar: Who Taught Us What to Desire?
Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar proposes rethinking the relationships between knowledge, territory, and ways of living.
In Feeling-Thinking with the Land, he highlights contributions from Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, and environmental movements in imagining alternatives to dominant models of development.
This reflection raises a question for reward neuroscience.
One society may prioritize material accumulation, competition, and consumption. Other collective experiences may place greater importance on reciprocity, care, and territorial continuity.
This does not imply that each culture possesses its own exclusive neural reward circuitry.
It means that learning conditions, social contexts, and shared experiences influence what becomes relevant to individuals.
Neuroscience can investigate the mechanisms underlying this learning. Anthropology can examine how criteria of value are constructed, contested, and transformed.
An interdisciplinary investigation need not reduce one explanation to another.
6. Ailton Krenak: The Value of a River Cannot Be Reduced to Monetary Reward
In Futuro ancestral (2022), Brazilian Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak challenges the separation between humanity and nature, emphasizing relationships with rivers, forests, ancestors, and other living beings.
His contribution is not a theory of dopaminergic circuits.
Instead, it challenges the limits of the criteria through which societies decide what deserves preservation.
When an economic activity rewards the destruction of a territory while its inhabitants value its continuity, we are not simply witnessing different individual preferences.
We are confronting a political dispute over the meaning of value.
Neuroscience can investigate processes involved in motivation and decision-making. However, those processes alone cannot determine which vision of society should prevail.
Such decisions require participation, recognition of differences, and collective responsibility.
7. Body-Territory: A Hypothesis for New Research
At BrainLatam, we use APUS and Tekoha as conceptual openings for investigating relationships between body and territory.
Tekoha invites questions about belonging, bodily regulation, and lived territory. APUS opens discussions about orientation, movement, and possibilities for action.
These approaches are not neuroscientific translations of the original Guarani and Andean concepts, whose meanings must remain recognized within their own cultural contexts.
We can imagine research combining learning tasks, EEG, fNIRS, physiological indicators, interviews, and ethnographic observations.
How do food security, community relationships, and territorial conditions influence reward and aversion learning?
These methods would not automatically reveal the values of a collective. They could produce complementary evidence interpreted alongside the participants themselves.
Such an approach could become an experimental contribution to Latin American Decolonial Neuroscience.
8. Who Has the Right to Interpret What We Feel?
Imagine artificial intelligence systems capable of identifying patterns associated with our preferences.
Who will control these data? Who will determine their meaning? Will participants be able to challenge the resulting interpretations?
At BrainLatam, these questions support our proposal for Personalized Sovereign AI (IA Personalíssima) and a form of Real Democracy in which each Body-Territory can participate in decisions affecting its existence.
We must distinguish:
Experiment → Result → Interpretation → Judgment → Decision.
The transition from scientific measurement to political decision-making is not automatic.
DOING IS SCIENCE. JUDGING IS POLITICS.
Neurobucano makes an important contribution by strengthening dialogue among Physics, Computing, Medicine, and Neuroscience in Pernambuco.
BrainLatam proposes extending this encounter by supporting Latin American autonomy in formulating scientific questions grounded in regional challenges and territories.
Decolonizing Neuroscience does not mean abandoning experimental rigor. It also means asking who defines research questions, who interprets results, and who participates in determining their consequences.
The brain participates in learning what we value.
But the life we learn to value does not unfold exclusively inside the brain.
Perhaps the next question for Neuroscience is not only what rewards us, but who creates the conditions for different forms of life to flourish.
Scientific and Intellectual References
Organized according to the article's argument. Each reference includes a concise explanation of its contribution, allowing this section to 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 seminar brought together researchers investigating neural valence and reward encoding, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue across Neuroscience, Physics, Computing, and Biomedical Engineering.
2. DESEYVE, Catarina et al. (2024). Nucleus accumbens neurons dynamically respond to appetitive and aversive associative learning. Journal of Neurochemistry, 168(3), 312–327.
Including contributions from Ana João Rodrigues and Carina Soares-Cunha, this study demonstrates how D1 and D2 neuronal populations dynamically participate in reward and aversion learning in mice.
3. VIEITAS-GASPAR, Natacha; SOARES-CUNHA, Carina; RODRIGUES, Ana João (2025). From valence encoding to motivated behavior: A focus on the nucleus accumbens circuitry. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 172, 106125.
This review updates models of valence encoding and motivated behavior, emphasizing interactions among neuronal populations traditionally associated with opposing functions.
4. PESSOA, Luiz (2022). The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together. MIT Press.
Brazilian neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa describes the brain as an interconnected network system, challenging rigid divisions between emotion, cognition, and behavior.
5. DAMASIO, Antonio; DAMASIO, Hanna (2024). Homeostatic Feelings and the Emergence of Consciousness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(8), 1653–1659.
The authors connect homeostatic feelings, sensory images, and subjectivity with conscious experience, highlighting bodily regulation as central to understanding the mind.
6. PEREIRA JR., Alfredo; AGUIAR, Vinícius Jonas de (2023). Fundamentos e aplicações da sentiômica: a ciência da capacidade de sentir. Trans/Form/Ação, 46, special issue, 57–86.
The Brazilian researchers distinguish measurable patterns associated with sentience from the qualitative dimensions of subjective experience, clarifying the possibilities and limitations of physiological measurements.
Scientific article - Trans/Form/Ação
7. ESCOBAR, Arturo (2020). Feeling-Thinking with the Land: Transitions. Re-visiones, 10.
The Colombian anthropologist examines how Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, and environmental movements contribute alternative understandings of territory, development, and collective well-being.
Academic article - Re-visiones
8. KRENAK, Ailton (2022). Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras.
The Brazilian Indigenous intellectual challenges the separation between humanity and nature, emphasizing the value of relationships with rivers, territories, ancestors, and other forms of life.
9. BRAINLATAM (2025). Monismo de triplo aspecto: uma possível nova forma de entender a consciência.
Introduces Alfredo Pereira Jr.'s philosophical framework connecting physical, informational, and experiential aspects of reality, opening a conceptual dialogue with consciousness research.
10. BRAINLATAM (2026). APUS e Tekoha — Como o mundo entra no corpo e o corpo retorna ao mundo.
Develops BrainLatam's conceptual dialogue among Body-Territory, interoception, movement, and belonging, while distinguishing neuroscientific interpretations from the original meanings of Indigenous concepts.
BRAINLATAM | W46/2026 | NEUROBUCANO | BLOG 01/08
