One Event - Metabolism, Movement, and Consciousness

We Cut Things Apart to Learn, Not to Be

Imagine a sprinter in the starting blocks.

The race has not yet begun for the observer.

But within the Body-Territory, the event is already in motion.

Posture reorganizes.

Muscles are pre-activated.

Attention shifts.

The heart reorganizes its intervals.

Breathing may change.

Ionic gradients are being maintained and modified.

ATP is being used and resynthesized.

Visual, proprioceptive, interoceptive, and auditory information moves across different scales of the organism.

Then comes the starting signal.

Within a few seconds, what we call “a race” happens simultaneously as:

chemistry,
energy,
muscular movement,
breathing,
circulation,
neural activity,
information,
emotion,
perception,
and consciousness.

Which of these dimensions contains the true event?

Perhaps the question itself is wrong.

Perhaps we are trying to divide ontologically what we only divided because we needed to learn how to study it.

Science Needs to Cut Things Apart

To understand the athlete, science creates variables.

ATP.

ADP.

AMP.

Inorganic phosphate.

AMPK.

mTOR.

Oxygen consumption.

Force.

Heart rate.

EEG.

NIRS.

Perceived exertion.

Each variable opens a window.

Without these cuts, much of modern physiology would be impossible.

The problem is not the act of cutting.

The problem begins when we confuse:

a window into the event

with

the whole event.

This is a central distinction for BrainLatam:

We cut things apart to learn, not to Be.

Movement Leaves a Chemistry Behind

Contract the fingers of your hand.

This small movement depends on the interaction between actin and myosin and on the use of ATP.

In simplified form:

ATP + H₂O → ADP + Pi + energy available for cellular processes.

ADP and inorganic phosphate are not simply waste produced by movement.

They become part of the material conditions encountered by the movements that follow.

ATP must be continuously resynthesized.

The relationships among ATP, ADP, and AMP participate in signaling the energetic state of the cell.

Inorganic phosphate can directly interfere with force production when it accumulates during fatiguing contractions, including through effects on contractile structures and Ca²⁺ handling. Recent evidence continues to reinforce its physiological role in muscular fatigue.

Thus, the movement of the hand is also:

ATP being hydrolyzed,
ADP and Pi changing locally,
Ca²⁺ moving,
gradients being reorganized,
heat being produced,
blood being redistributed.

Movement does not leave only a new position in space.

It leaves a different chemistry in the Body-Territory.

ATP Is Not an Isolated Tank

It would also be misleading to imagine that muscle simply contains a reservoir of ATP that gradually runs out.

The organism continuously works to resynthesize ATP through different systems:

phosphocreatine,

glycolysis,

carbohydrate oxidation,

fatty-acid oxidation,

mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation.

A 2023 review in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology describes skeletal muscle as a tissue with remarkable metabolic flexibility, in which a single exercise session simultaneously changes substrate use, cellular signaling, transcription, and processes associated with later adaptation.

What we observe as:

“he ran one hundred meters”

may be true.

But it is only one possible scale of the event.

Even “Burning Fat” Is a Cut

The expression “burning fat” compresses an enormous chain of events.

Fatty acids need to be mobilized.

Transported.

Taken up by cells.

Processed.

Directed toward mitochondrial machinery.

Oxidized.

Integrated into processes that help sustain ATP resynthesis.

And all of this depends on:

intensity,

duration,

training status,

nutritional state,

substrate availability,

and the previous material state of the organism.

Therefore:

fat → ATP → movement

is not an isolated line.

It is part of a metabolic network occurring within the same Body-Territory that breathes, perceives effort, and decides whether to continue.

AMPK: A Material Difference Becomes a Signal

When energetic demand increases, one important network is AMP-activated protein kinase — AMPK.

AMPK participates in the cellular response to energetic state.

Relationships among ATP, ADP, and AMP help materially signal that demand has changed.

There is not first an abstract entity called “energy information” and only afterward a cellular response.

The molecular configuration itself contains differences capable of participating in signaling.

Brazilian researchers led by Juliane Cruz Campos and Julio Cesar Batista Ferreira, from the University of São Paulo, showed in 2023 functional relationships among exercise, AMPK, and mitochondrial dynamics. In experimental models, a single exercise session produced a cycle of mitochondrial fragmentation followed by fusion, and the integrity of this dynamic was important for physical capacity and adaptation.

The race occurs on the track.

But it is also occurring in the dynamic reorganization of mitochondria.

mTOR Does Not Live in Another World

mTORC1 participates in processes related to growth, protein synthesis, nutrient availability, and responses to mechanical stimuli.

We often create a didactic opposition:

AMPK = conserve energy

mTOR = grow.

This can be useful for learning.

But once again, it is a cut.

In actual physiology, these networks interact.

Their responses depend on tissue, stimulus, energetic state, and timescale.

Exercise may simultaneously produce:

energetic demand,

mechanical stress,

redox changes,

signaling,

quality control,

transcription,

synthesis,

degradation,

remodeling.

The Body-Territory does not need to choose one of these words in order to exist.

Stress Can Be Part of Adaptation

A predominantly Brazilian group from Unicamp showed in 2023 that acute exercise can trigger mitochondrial stress signals and activate the mitochondrial unfolded protein response, UPRmt, in skeletal muscle.

This produces an apparent contradiction.

At the immediate scale:

perturbation.

At another timescale:

possibility of adaptation.

Another Brazilian group showed that PGC-1α-related signaling connects exercise to metabolic adaptations distributed across tissues including muscle, adipose tissue, heart, liver, and brain.

The current movement therefore participates in the material conditions of the next movement.

When Does “I Am Tired” Appear?

Now the sprinter feels:

“this is getting heavy.”

What exactly became heavy?

ATP?

Pi?

The muscle?

Breathing?

The heart?

The brain?

Expectation?

Perhaps no single cut can answer.

Brazilian researchers reported in 2023 intensity-dependent relationships among interoceptive accuracy, perceived exertion, and affective valence during aerobic exercise. This suggests that physiological variables and subjective experience need to be studied together rather than assumed to map onto one another in a simple one-to-one way.

Antonio and Hanna Damasio propose that homeostatic feelings participate in continuous information about the state of the living organism and relate this dimension to the biology of consciousness. In later work, they explicitly defend a central role for feelings in consciousness.

Chilean researcher Diego Candia-Rivera and colleagues move in a similar direction through network physiology: bodily awareness is studied through interactions among brain activity, visceral signals, and different sensory modalities rather than as the isolated product of one brain region.

This helps us abandon one image:

the brain observes the body.

Perhaps it is more accurate to think:

brain and body jointly compose the event that may become perceived.

Alfredo Pereira Jr.: Three Aspects, Not Three Worlds

Here the Triple-Aspect Monism of Brazilian researcher Alfredo Pereira Jr. becomes especially important.

Pereira proposes that three jointly necessary aspects should be considered in conscious experience:

the materiality of the living body,
dynamic patterns of information,
sentience.

But he does not present them as three substances or three independent universes.

In his contemporary formulation of Triple-Aspect Monism, the aim is to preserve unity within the diversity of phenomena.

In 2024, while developing Qualiomics, Pereira emphasized another important limit: qualitative first-person experience cannot simply be replaced by quantitative third-person description.

Return to the athlete.

We Can Cut Materially

ATP.

Pi.

Ca²⁺.

Muscle.

Blood.

Temperature.

We Can Cut Informationally

Speed.

Distance.

Position.

Rhythm.

Error.

Goal.

We Can Ask About Sentience

Effort.

Pain.

Control.

Anxiety.

Lightness.

Presence.

But three races did not happen.

One athlete ran.

Body-Territory: Here BrainLatam Stops Cutting

This is where BrainLatam needs to make its conceptual difference explicit.

We can cut:

heart,

brain,

lung,

muscle,

metabolism,

behavior,

consciousness.

We can even cut:

body

and

territory

in order to study them.

But for BrainLatam, Body-Territory is the unit of Being.

We are not proposing another organ.

Nor a new variable.

Nor another layer added after brain and body.

We are saying that after all the cuts used for learning, we must remember that what exists, lives, exchanges matter, produces movement, feels, acts, and occupies a territory remains one situated unit.

Body-Territory is not another cut of Being.
It is the point at which we decide to stop cutting it.

This is a BrainLatam formulation.

It is in dialogue with, but should not be confused with, Latin American traditions of cuerpo-territorio, which have been used to show the inseparability of bodily experience, territory, violence, memory, politics, and community.

Our formulation extends this toward a physiological and ontological question:

where does a living organism end if its existence continuously depends on air, water, food, temperature, other beings, and the space in which its movements become possible?

There is a boundary.

But there is no absolute separation.

We Cut Things Apart to Learn, Not to Be

Now we can expand the phrase.

Science needs to cut in order to measure.

Politics creates categories in order to decide.

Economics creates indicators in order to compare and distribute resources.

Religions create words, narratives, symbols, and practices to organize experience and meaning.

None of this is necessarily a problem.

The cuts can be extraordinarily useful.

The problem begins when a local optimum starts perceiving itself as the whole.

In neuroscience:

“I found this network; therefore I found the self.”

In economics:

“GDP increased; therefore society improved.”

In politics:

“you belong to this group; therefore I now know who you are.”

In religion:

“this formulation describes my experience; therefore it completely describes Being.”

These are different leaps, but they share a similar structure.

A representation that is efficient within one domain begins to claim authority over everything beyond it.

That is why we insist:

We cut things apart to learn, not to Be.

A Local Optimum Does Not Need to Be False in Order to Become a Prison

A belief does not need to be completely false in order to become limiting.

A scientific model may work.

An economic policy may work.

A tradition may organize a community.

A religious interpretation may provide meaning.

A physiological marker may predict performance.

All of them may be optimal within one region of the problem.

BrainLatam calls this a local optimum.

The risk begins when:

it works here

becomes:

therefore everything is like this.

Or worse:

therefore I am this.

At that moment, a cut created for learning may begin to imprison what we perceive ourselves to Be.

Latin America Already Offers Other Questions

In Ancestral Future (2022), Ailton Krenak repeatedly challenges the fantasy of a humanity separated from the living world and brings rivers, landscapes, and ancestry back into the possibility of imagining a future.

In A terra dá, a terra quer (2023), Antônio Bispo dos Santos develops his idea of confluence from relationships that do not need to erase differences in order to exist together. His reflections also challenge a view of life organized primarily through utility.

We do not need to turn Krenak or Bispo into neuroscientists.

Nor translate their concepts into biomarkers.

They offer something else:

questions about the error of transforming conceptual separations into separations of existence.

This is precisely the frontier in which BrainLatam intends to position itself:

Neuroscience, Politics, and Religion not as three closed territories, but as three human places from which we attempt to understand events that continue to traverse one Body-Territory.

What If Technology Creates a New Cut Only to Help Us Later Abandon It?

Elite athletes make this experimentally interesting.

They may already possess an extraordinary ability to perceive subtle bodily differences.

Yet part of physiological dynamics remains below conscious perception.

Imagine simultaneously measuring:

breathing,

ETCO₂,

RR-interval trajectories,

EMG,

force,

asymmetry,

muscle oxygenation,

joint movement.

These differences already exist in the Body-Territory.

Technology does not need to create them.

It may make them perceptible.

Augmented Reality as a Temporary Prosthesis of Perception

In 2026, Wimmer and colleagues demonstrated an online brain-computer interface for augmented reality combining EEG and eye-tracking.

The system identified neural responses associated with incongruity between digitally presented information and the participant’s expectation, achieving approximately 70% balanced accuracy in online classification.

The study did not investigate athletes.

But it establishes a principle:

a technological environment can respond to physiological differences while experience is still unfolding.

In another 2026 study, 30 national-level sprinters underwent training with multisensory XR feedback. The group improved 30-meter sprint performance by 2.81% and retained a substantial part of the gain four weeks later. EEG, fNIRS, and biomechanical measures were also used to track changes associated with training.

This does not yet demonstrate our hypothesis.

But it allows us to build one.

Making Perceptible What Was Already Happening

Imagine that the athlete sees, through augmented reality, a very simple representation indicating that a particular combination of:

breathing,

tension,

force,

heart rhythm,

and timing of force application

precedes their best acceleration.

At first, the information exists consciously only because sensors cut it out and an interface transformed it into an image or sound.

But after hundreds of repetitions, another question appears:

can the athlete learn to directly perceive bodily differences that previously needed to be externalized?

The sequence would be:

already existing physiological movement
→ sensor cuts it out
→ technology amplifies the difference
→ the difference acquires qualia
→ the association is repeated
→ bodily perception becomes more differentiated
→ technology is gradually removed
→ the athlete may begin to recognize the dynamics internally.

This final transition remains hypothetical.

But it can be tested.

Interestingly, Pereira Jr. notes in his Qualiomics that scientific and technological developments may expand the repertoire of qualia available to experience.

Technology could therefore function as a temporary prosthesis of differentiation.

Not to replace the Body-Territory.

But to help it learn to perceive movements it was already producing.

Consciousness as Movement That Perceives Itself Being

We return to the BrainLatam formulation:

consciousness is a movement that perceives itself Being within the metabolism produced.

Here we use “produced metabolism” in a deliberately expanded sense.

We are not changing the technical biochemical definition.

We are using the term to refer to the material movements produced within the Body-Territory:

chemical,

energetic,

ionic,

electrical,

vascular,

respiratory,

visceral,

muscular,

mechanical.

Some of these movements remain below perception.

Some may acquire qualia.

Chilean researcher Camilo Miguel Signorelli and Argentine researcher Enzo Tagliazucchi, with colleagues, proposed in 2022 a multilayer approach to consciousness through dynamic brain-body interactions. Their work does not prove 5D Consciousness, but it reinforces the need not to reduce conscious experience to a single physiological scale.

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, when part of this material movement becomes perceived as a state of one’s own Being, we encounter conscious experience.

The Same Event

Return to the sprinter.

The starting signal sounds.

Now there are simultaneously:

ATP,
ADP,
Pi,
Ca²⁺,
AMPK,
mTOR,
mitochondria,
glucose,
fat,
muscles,
breathing,
heart,
brain,
territory,
information,
memory,
emotion,
effort,
qualia,
decision.

We can separate all of this in order to learn.

We need to separate it.

Science depends on it.

But the sprinter never had to choose within which of these cuts they would exist.

They ran.

As a Body-Territory.

A unit of Being.

Perhaps this is one of the most recurrent errors not only in science, but also in politics, economics, and religion:

confusing the precision of a cut with the totality of what was cut.

That is why our phrase is not a rejection of knowledge.

It is a defense of its humility:

We cut things apart to learn, not to Be.

And perhaps deep knowledge is precisely this:

to approach one part,

measure it,

name it,

understand it,

and still remember that Being never needed to fit inside it.

Main References

PEREIRA JR., A. (2024). Qualiomics: The Metaphysics of Consciousness. Forum for Philosophical Studies, 1(1), 489. DOI: 10.59400/fps.v1i1.489.
Brazilian researcher Alfredo Pereira Jr. develops Qualiomics from Triple-Aspect Monism, distinguishes scientific description from qualitative first-person experience, and discusses how science and technology may expand the repertoire of qualia available to experience.

PEREIRA JR., A. (2023). Introdução à Metafísica do Monismo de Triplo Aspecto. ANPOF.
Presents the materiality of the living body, dynamic informational patterns, and sentience as jointly necessary aspects within a monist ontology rather than as three independent worlds.

DAMASIO, A.; DAMASIO, H. (2022). Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness. Brain, 145(7), 2231–2235. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac194.
Connects homeostatic feelings to the organism’s continuous representation of its internal state and to the biology of consciousness.

DAMASIO, A.; DAMASIO, H. (2023). Feelings Are the Source of Consciousness. Neural Computation, 35(3), 277–286. DOI: 10.1162/neco_a_01521.
Further develops the hypothesis that feelings and interoception play a central role in producing conscious experience.

CAMPOS, J. C. et al. (2023). Exercise preserves physical fitness during aging through AMPK and mitochondrial dynamics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(2), e2204750120. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2204750120.
Research led by Brazilian scientists at the University of São Paulo links exercise, AMPK, mitochondrial dynamics, and physical capacity, illustrating how macroscopic movement produces microscopic reorganization.

GASPAR, R. S. et al. (2023). Physical exercise elicits UPRmt in the skeletal muscle: The role of c-Jun N-terminal kinase. Molecular Metabolism, 78, 101816. DOI: 10.1016/j.molmet.2023.101816.
Brazilian research showing that acute exercise produces mitochondrial stress signals and activates quality-control mechanisms, connecting present perturbation with later adaptation.

SOUSA NETO, I. V. et al. (2023). Pleiotropic and multi-systemic actions of physical exercise on PGC-1α signaling during the aging process. Ageing Research Reviews, 87, 101935. DOI: 10.1016/j.arr.2023.101935.
A Brazilian-led review discussing how PGC-1α-related signaling connects exercise to metabolic adaptations distributed across different organs and tissues.

SMITH, J. A. B.; MURACH, K. A.; DYAR, K. A.; ZIERATH, J. R. (2023). Exercise metabolism and adaptation in skeletal muscle. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 24, 607–632. DOI: 10.1038/s41580-023-00606-x.
Provides a contemporary synthesis of ATP use, energetic substrates, signaling, and metabolic plasticity during exercise.

FARIAS-JUNIOR, L. F. et al. (2023). Intensity-Dependent Influence of Interoceptive Accuracy on Psychophysiological Responses During Aerobic Exercise in Physically Inactive Men. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 130(4), 1562–1586.
Brazilian research showing relationships among interoception, perceived exertion, and affective experience during exercise, helping connect physiology with first-person experience.

CANDIA-RIVERA, D. et al. (2024). Interoception, network physiology and the emergence of bodily self-awareness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 165, 105864. DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105864.
Chilean researcher Diego Candia-Rivera and colleagues propose understanding bodily awareness through interactions among distributed brain and physiological signals.

SIGNORELLI, C. M.; DÍAZ BOILS, J.; TAGLIAZUCCHI, E.; JARRAYA, B.; DECO, G. (2022). From brain-body function to conscious interactions. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 141, 104833. DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104833.
With Chilean researcher Camilo Signorelli and Argentine researcher Enzo Tagliazucchi, proposes a multilayer framework for investigating brain-body interactions and consciousness.

GLOCKNER, V. et al. (2023). The Cuerpo-Territorio of Displacement: A Decolonial Feminist Geopolitics of Re-Existencia. Geopolitics. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2023.2213639.
Applies cuerpo-territorio to displacement and violence in Mexico, showing how bodily, territorial, communal, and political experience can be analyzed together.

SILVA, I. G.; MIRANDA, E. O. (2023). A decolonialidade e corpo-território como base epistémica para compreensão do racismo ambiental no Brasil. Geografia Ensino & Pesquisa.
Develops body-territory in the Brazilian context as an epistemological tool for understanding environmental, territorial, racial, and political relationships together.

KRENAK, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Challenges conceptions of humanity separated from the living world and offers an Indigenous perspective in which rivers, territory, ancestry, and existence participate together in the possibility of a future.

BISPO DOS SANTOS, A. (2023). A terra dá, a terra quer. São Paulo: Ubu Editora/Piseagrama.
Develops the idea of confluence and contrasts living relations of reciprocity and necessity with forms of organization based mainly on utility, offering an Afro-Brazilian perspective on coexistence without erasing difference.

WIMMER, M. et al. (2026). An online brain-computer interface for detecting incongruity in augmented reality applications. Journal of Neural Engineering, 23, 036024. DOI: 10.1088/1741-2552/ae6ff1.
Demonstrates that a system combining EEG, eye-tracking, and augmented reality can identify neural responses to incongruity online during the ongoing experience.

XU, Z.; WANG, Z.; QIN, G. (2026). An XR-based multisensory feedback system for real-time sprint technique optimization in track athletes. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-60240-3.
A study with sprinters provides recent evidence that multisensory XR feedback can modify performance, motor coordination, and neurophysiological measures, providing a basis for future tests of perceptual differentiation of one’s own physiological dynamics.

BrainLatam (2026). 5D Consciousness / Body-Territory.
Defines Body-Territory as the unit of Being: physiological, psychological, social, and territorial cuts may be necessary for knowledge, but they do not constitute ontologically independent units of the living Being.

BrainLatam (2026). We Cut Things Apart to Learn, Not to Be.
Summarizes the distinction between epistemological cuts and ontological identity: science, politics, economics, and religion may generate useful local optima of explanation and organization without those optima needing to be confused with the totality of Being.