The Brain During Change -  Hutcheon’s 150 Seconds

There are changes we recognize only after they have already happened. I was awake and, at some point, I fell asleep. I was running and then, sometime later, I realized I was already recovering my breath. I entered an unfamiliar place and, a few minutes later, my body seemed to have decided whether that environment felt safe.

We usually give names to the states: wakefulness, sleep, effort, rest, fear, safety. But what happens in the interval when I have not completely left one state and have not yet stabilized in the next?

This is the question that opens W40/2026: what does a transition reveal that before and after cannot show us?

A study by Evan Hutcheon and colleagues, published in 2023 in Human Brain Mapping, offers an unexpectedly precise entry point into this question. The researchers were not studying “Metanoia,” transcendence, or existential transformation. They were investigating hypoxia: specifically, how peripheral oxygen saturation, SpO₂, relates to brain activity measured by EEG during normobaric and hypobaric hypoxia. Absolute and relative spectral power and multiscale entropy were analyzed while SpO₂ was recorded simultaneously.

The decisive detail appeared in time.

In normobaric hypoxia, participants began breathing the low-oxygen mixture at the start of the recording. During the first 150 seconds, therefore, their SpO₂ was still falling. In the hypobaric condition, however, participants had already undergone decompression before the analyzed recording began and entered that period already desaturated.

This allowed the researchers to observe something that a simple comparison between “normal” and “hypoxic” conditions might have hidden:

the brain while SpO₂ was falling did not show exactly the same pattern as the brain after oxygen saturation had stabilized.

During the first 150 seconds of normobaric hypoxia, the relationship between EEG and SpO₂ showed a robust pattern. Correlations involving alpha and low-beta power, together with changes in multiscale entropy, distinguished this active desaturation phase from the other conditions. The authors concluded that active desaturation during those first 150 seconds drove much of the difference observed when the full five-minute recording was analyzed.

When they analyzed only the final 150 seconds, once SpO₂ was relatively stable, differences between conditions were no longer significant for absolute power, relative power, or MSE.

At the end of the paper, the authors formulate the observation that matters especially to W40/2026: the brain responds differently to changing SpO₂ than to steady-state hypoxia.

It is important not to move beyond what the evidence actually supports.

Hutcheon did not demonstrate a universal law of transitions. Hypobaric desaturation was not recorded while it was occurring, so the study cannot establish that every form of desaturation produces the same neural signature. Nor can we transform 150 seconds into a universal measure of human transformation.

Those 150 seconds belong to that experiment.

But the question they open can be larger.

If I measure only A and B, what happens to A → B?

In 2025, Matthew Hall and colleagues investigated progressive hypoxia. Inspired oxygen was reduced across successive levels while EEG, physiology, symptoms, and cognitive performance were monitored. The researchers found changes in the temporal dynamics of EEG bursts that tracked the progression of the hypoxic state.

Hall did not simply replicate Hutcheon. The experimental designs were different.

What matters to us is something else: when a phenomenon is preserved as a process, rather than reduced to an initial and a final snapshot, information about its trajectory begins to appear.

A third piece comes from something we do every day: falling asleep.

In 2025, Junheng Li and colleagues analyzed EEG data from more than one thousand participants and represented the passage from wakefulness to sleep as a trajectory through a space of brain features. They identified dynamics consistent with a bifurcation, a tipping point, and critical slowing down before the transition.

This is not the same physiology as hypoxia.

We should not collapse the two.

But there is a powerful methodological similarity. Instead of asking only “wakefulness or sleep?”, we can ask:

how is the system approaching change?

Perhaps I can bring that question into my own experience without turning personal experience into scientific evidence.

When my state changes, what changes first?

My breathing?

My attention?

My heart rate?

My perception of the environment?

The way I perceive my own body?

My brain activity?

Or the interpretation I give to what I am feeling?

These dimensions do not need to change together, nor do they need to obey the same clock. This is precisely where one of the questions that will accompany us throughout W40/2026 begins: which variable announces a transition, which one accompanies it, and which one changes only after a new state has already begun to form?

The Andes also teach us that a state carries history

Latin America offers a particularly important territory for thinking about oxygen, brain, environment, and time.

In 2024, Carlos Coronel-Oliveros, Vicente Medel, and colleagues, with strong participation from Chilean institutions, compared EEG recordings obtained at sea level with recordings during acute exposure to approximately 4,000 meters of altitude. They found changes in spectral power, aperiodic activity, and the organization of functional connectivity associated with high-altitude hypoxia.

That experiment was not designed to locate the instant of transition as Hutcheon’s study did. But it expands our landscape:

oxygen, territory, and brain organization can be studied together.

In the Peruvian Andes, the timescale changes again.

Francisco Villafuerte, Daniela Bermudez, Fabiola León-Velarde, and colleagues discussed adaptive and maladaptive responses to chronic hypoxia in high-altitude populations. An increase in oxygen-carrying capacity can contribute to adaptation; when erythrocytosis becomes excessive, however, it may become part of chronic mountain sickness.

In La Rinconada, Peru, located above 5,000 meters, another study published in 2024 found that aspects of cerebral homeostasis remained broadly preserved despite the profound hypoxemia observed in long-term residents.

This prevents us from making a seductive mistake:

imagining that “hypoxia” is one single thing.

One hundred and fifty seconds of desaturation, several hours at altitude, weeks of acclimatization, and many years of living in the Andes are different bodily histories.

The challenge may share one dimension — oxygen availability — but the Body-Territory encounters it carrying time, environment, learning, adaptation, and history.

A state is not only a place.

A state also carries a trajectory.

Jiwasa: the question no longer belongs only to the person who wrote it

This is where Jiwasa begins to participate in W40/2026.

Within the Aymara pronominal system, jiwasa/jiwasanaka is associated with the inclusive “we”: a we that includes both the person speaking and the person being addressed. Contemporary Peruvian work on intercultural communication discusses this distinction between inclusive and exclusive forms and how it remains present in Aymara communicative practices.

We are not claiming that Jiwasa is a concept from neuroscience.

The extension we make within W40/2026 is different.

I remain I. You remain you. But the question can exist between us.

I can look at Hutcheon and find an experimental result. You may — or may not — recognize a similar passage in your own experience. The data do not become true because we feel them. And what we feel does not cease to exist simply because it did not appear in that EEG.

These are different levels.

My experience may generate a question.
Evidence may correct my interpretation.
Your experience may generate another question.
And neither of us needs to own the conclusion alone.

This is a deeper meaning of Jiwasa for this series: not dissolving the self into the collective, but allowing knowledge to emerge within a relationship in which writer and reader both remain present.

Not every transition is transcendence

This position also protects us from a tempting word.

Not every transition is transcendence.

A fall in SpO₂ is not a spiritual experience. Falling asleep is not Metanoia. A mathematical bifurcation does not explain an epiphany.

If these phenomena are to speak to one another, the bridge must be constructed and tested — never assumed.

That is why, before searching for extraordinary states, W40/2026 begins with something simpler:

learning to see the transient.

Later we will discuss latent heat, microstates, metastability, homeostasis, breathing, altered states, belief, transcendence, and Metanoia.

A recent review on metastability reminds us that the brain combines relatively stable integration with possibilities for segregation and reorganization — while also warning against using the word “metastability” imprecisely.

Our question therefore becomes:

how can a system remain stable enough to continue existing while remaining flexible enough to change?

Perhaps we can now understand why Hutcheon’s 150 seconds are such a useful beginning.

They do not tell us who we are.

They do not tell us where we should go.

They do not prove transcendence.

They show something more modest — and perhaps for that reason more important: if we wait until the final state to look, we may lose the dynamics that made that state possible.

Hutcheon left us a 150-second window.

I can look at it as scientific data. You can find within it a question about your own transitions. Jiwasa does not require us to reach the same answer. It allows the investigation to happen between us without erasing the differences each Body-Territory brings.

And so the first question of W40/2026 returns, now a little more ours:

how many times have we named only the place we came from and the place we reached — while leaving unnamed the very moment in which we were becoming different?

Commented References

All references below were published after 2021. The comments are written so that the sequence of references alone reconstructs the central idea of this blog.

Hutcheon, E. A., Vakorin, V. A., Nunes, A., Ribary, U., Ferguson, S., Claydon, V. E., & Doesburg, S. M. (2023). Associations between spontaneous electroencephalogram oscillations and oxygen saturation across normobaric and hypobaric hypoxia. Human Brain Mapping, 44(6), 2345–2364.
What this reference represents: the starting point of W40/2026. The first 150 seconds of active desaturation showed EEG–SpO₂ relationships that differed from those observed after stabilization, allowing us to ask whether being in the process of changing contains information that disappears when we examine only the state that has already been reached.

Hall, M. J., Pellizzer, G., McHail, D. G., Blacker, K. J., Francis, D. J., & Ince, N. F. (2025). EEG burst dynamics as an indicator of a progressive hypoxic state. Journal of Neurophysiology, 133(6), 1980–1996.
What this reference represents: follows hypoxia as a progression rather than treating it only as separate conditions. It shows why preserving the temporal dimension can reveal how the brain travels through a physiological change.

Li, J., Ilina, A., Peach, R., et al. (2025). Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic. Nature Neuroscience, 28, 2515–2525.
What this reference represents: demonstrates, in a completely different transition — wakefulness to sleep — that the path between two states can have measurable structure, including bifurcation, a tipping point, and critical slowing down. The question shifts from “what state is this?” toward “how is this system changing?”

Coronel-Oliveros, C., Medel, V., et al. (2024). Elevating understanding: Linking high-altitude hypoxia to brain aging through EEG functional connectivity and spectral analyses. Network Neuroscience, 8(1), 275–292.
What this reference represents: brings the discussion into the Andean territory and Latin American scientific production, showing that changes in oxygen availability at high altitude are associated with measurable differences in oscillations, aperiodic activity, and brain connectivity.

Villafuerte, F. C., Simonson, T. S., Bermudez, D., & León-Velarde, F. (2022). High-Altitude Erythrocytosis: Mechanisms of Adaptive and Maladaptive Responses. Physiology, 37(4).
What this reference represents: researchers connected to Peru show that prolonged high-altitude exposure can involve both adaptive and maladaptive responses. It introduces an essential idea: the same physiological challenge encounters bodies carrying different temporal histories.

Furian, M., Ulliel-Roche, M., Howe, C. A., et al. (2024). Cerebral homeostasis and orthostatic responses in residents of the highest city in the world. Scientific Reports, 14, 17732.
What this reference represents: long-term residents of La Rinconada demonstrate that years of severe hypoxic exposure are not equivalent to a few minutes of experimental desaturation. It helps us understand that homeostasis is also a history of adaptation.

Hancock, F., Rosas, F. E., Luppi, A. I., et al. (2025). Metastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 26(2), 82–100.
What this reference represents: provides rigorous language for thinking about brain systems that combine relative stability with the possibility of reorganization, preparing the next question of W40/2026: how can a system change without simply losing its organization?

Escobar, W. (2024). Comunicación intercultural desde los medios de comunicación. Lengua y Sociedad, 23(2).
What this reference represents: situates within a contemporary Peruvian context the Aymara distinction between forms of “we,” including the inclusive plural associated with jiwasa/jiwasanaka. For W40/2026, it provides the basis for not reducing Jiwasa to “cooperation”: the person speaking and the person listening participate in the we without needing to erase their differences.