The Body That Practices Does Not Remain the Same Body

When imitation, repetition, and trust in a movement can build excellence — or trap a Body-Territory inside the movement it learned to be

Imagine two hands resting on a piano.

The right hand plays one sequence. The left plays another. Both belong to the same piece of music, but they must cooperate without becoming identical.

For an experienced pianist, this coordination is part of a history built through thousands of repetitions: scales, chords, mistakes, and corrections.

In 2026, Tatsuya Kato and colleagues published a study in iScience examining how this long history of bimanual practice is associated with the way sensory information from the two hands interacts in the brain.

The question can be reduced to something simple:

Can one hand change what we perceive with the other?

And if so:

Can years of piano practice change that relationship?

Can one hand interfere with the other?

Imagine a right-handed person.

The right hand is dominant. The left is non-dominant.

Now suppose we want to know what happens to the perception of the left hand while the right hand is also moving.

Then we reverse the situation.

Kato and colleagues compared expert pianists with nonmusicians.

They used a robotic device capable of passively moving the participants’ fingers while EEG recorded their brain responses. They also applied electrical stimulation to nerves in the hands at precisely controlled intervals to examine whether sensory information coming from one hand altered the processing of information from the other.

Finally, participants performed a perceptual task:

when one hand was moving, did it become harder to accurately perceive what was happening to the other?

The experimental question was almost:

Does the right hand interfere with the left?

Does the left interfere with the right?

And is that relationship the same in pianists and nonmusicians?

Among nonmusicians, a relatively consistent asymmetry appeared.

Put simply, the dominant hand interfered more strongly with processing related to the non-dominant hand.

In a right-handed person:

the right hand influenced the left more than the left influenced the right.

This is what is meant by directional asymmetry: the effect of A on B is not equivalent to the effect of B on A.

It does not mean that one hand “controls” the other.

It simply means that, under those experimental conditions, there was a predominant direction in the interaction.

In pianists, the pattern was different.

The researchers did not find consistent evidence, at the group level, for the same directional asymmetry in early somatosensory responses. In the perceptual task, one hand interfered with perception of the other in both directions.

In a simplified form:

Nonmusicians: dominant hand → non-dominant hand

Pianists: right hand ↔ left hand

This representation is only illustrative. The study does not show that pianists “feel better,” nor does it prove that musical training is the sole cause of these differences.

The finding is more specific:

Bodies with very different histories of using both hands showed different patterns in the way sensory information from those hands interacted.

And this is where our question begins.

Where did all those hours at the piano go?

Imagine a pianist who has practiced for twenty years.

After rehearsal, they close the piano and leave.

Where did all those hours go?

They were not stored somewhere as “hours.”

But something from that history remains.

The fingers learned distances, forces, timing, sequences, and relationships between one hand and the other. Movements that once required intense attention became part of an available repertoire.

Experience helped construct the body that will encounter the next experience.

This is where we meet one of BrainLatam’s central ideas.

Extended Yãy hã mĩy: imitating in order to learn to be — and perceiving in order to transcend

In the BrainLatam framework, we use Extended Yãy hã mĩy as a hypothesis about a fundamental process of human learning:

we imitate.

Then we repeat.

Repetition may become habit.

Habit may become custom.

Custom may participate in the construction of beliefs.

And what has been repeated often enough may acquire a form of embodied trust.

Operationally, we call this bodily faith.

The beginner pianist watches, attempts to reproduce, makes mistakes, corrects them, and repeats until a movement that once had to be consciously planned step by step begins to require much less conscious effort.

The body has learned to trust that repertoire.

That trust is necessary.

But what creates efficiency can also create a boundary.

The local optimum of blind faith

Imagine a solution that works extremely well.

It may not be perfect.

It may not even be the best possible solution.

But it works well enough for the organism to stop searching for alternatives.

Metaphorically, we can call this a local optimum.

The problem begins when:

“this movement works”

becomes:

“this is the only possible movement.”

Technique becomes dogma.

Habit becomes identity.

Belief stops being a tool and begins to define what the Body-Territory believes itself to be.

This is the sense in which we speak of blind faith.

It may be a repertoire that worked so well, for so long, that there was no longer any reason to search for another.

It offers predictability and belonging.

But it may also narrow what we perceive as possible.

Metacognition: using history without becoming trapped by it

Perhaps high performance is not only the ability to execute perfectly what we have learned.

Perhaps it is also the ability to perceive our own repertoire, use it, question it, and, when the territory changes, construct another movement.

Here we reach the second half of Extended Yãy hã mĩy:

Imitate yourself into Being in order to transcend the Being you learned to become.

First, we imitate in order to construct a body capable of doing.

Then we need to perceive what has been incorporated so that we do not become trapped inside the body we learned to be.

Metacognition does not need to destroy habit, belief, or faith.

It may allow the organism to use its history without being completely defined by it.

The pianist does not need to abandon the scales they learned.

But they can use those scales without believing that every possible form of music is already contained within them.

From the piano to the Body-Territory

A young person does not imitate only musical movements.

They imitate ways of speaking, working, cooperating, responding to fear, recognizing authority, and belonging.

Repetition builds habits.

Habits participate in beliefs.

And beliefs can construct movements that feel natural simply because they were incorporated before we ever began to question them.

The Body-Territory is therefore also a body carrying histories of relationships, practices, and learned possibilities.

And where does Tekoha enter?

Tekoha is not a concept created by neuroscience.

Its origins lie within Guarani territorialities and worldviews, in which territory is not simply physical space, but a place of life, relationships, belonging, and ways of existing.

BrainLatam does not propose turning Tekoha into a neural marker.

Our operational extension asks:

How much of a lived territory continues to participate in the way a Body-Territory perceives and acts even when that territory is no longer immediately present?

The piano may be closed, but something of that relationship remains.

A community may be far away, yet language, habits, beliefs, techniques, and forms of cooperation may continue to live within the body.

In this sense, we ask whether part of a lived Tekoha may remain embodied as a history of possibilities.

The Latin American question

This question becomes especially powerful in Latin America.

Our region contains forms of embodied knowledge produced in universities, families, forests, rural communities, neighborhoods, oral traditions, observation, and everyday work.

The question should not be which of these produces the “best brain.”

A more interesting question is:

What different Body-Territories are constructed by different histories of practice?

And there is also a social question.

Two young people may have similar potential.

One has access to an instrument, a teacher, time, food, safety, and space to make mistakes.

The other does not.

Twenty years later, we may call the entire difference between their repertoires individual talent.

But how much of that talent was also territory?

Where the article ends and BrainLatam begins

Kato and colleagues found different patterns of somatosensory interaction between expert pianists and nonmusicians.

Up to this point:

Kato and colleagues.

The study did not measure Yãy hã mĩy, Tekoha, or Body-Territory.

From this point onward:

BrainLatam.

Our question is:

If repeating movements for years participates in shaping the way an organism senses and coordinates its hands, what other imitations, habits, beliefs, and forms of faith may also remain embodied within a Body-Territory?

And another:

When does what we have incorporated lead us toward excellence — and when does it trap us in a local optimum that we can no longer perceive as only one possibility among many?

Perhaps learning means incorporating a movement.

And perhaps high performance begins when we can use what we have incorporated without becoming imprisoned by the body we learned to be.

Neuro Challenge Latam

Think of something you can now do almost without thinking.

Can you still recognize that it is a learned movement — and imagine a different way of doing it?

Scientific Reference

Kato, T., Hirano, M., Shiotani, S., & Furuya, S. (2026). Distinct directional patterns of somatosensory interhemispheric interactions in expert pianists and nonmusicians. iScience, 29(8), 116699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.116699