What Does Neuroscience Call Normal - and Who Was Left Outside That Measure?

When Words Begin to Trap Us

BrainLatam Special Series — SBNeC 2026

Let us imagine that you and I take a memory test.

There is an average score.

An expected time.

A number of correct answers considered adequate.

Those who remain close to the average receive a word:

normal.

But before accepting that word, we can ask together:

Normal in relation to whom?

Who built that average?

What language did they speak?

How many years of schooling did they have?

Where did they grow up?

Which objects did they recognize?

What relationship did they have with school, time, numbers, territory, and writing?

Science needs measurement.

The problem is not measurement.

The problem begins when we forget that:

the ruler also has a history.

“Normal” does not come ready-made from nature

Neuropsychological norms are essential.

They help identify changes, monitor disease, and guide care.

But they are not natural properties found already written inside the brain.

They are constructed from reference populations.

And a significant part of modern Cognitive Science has been built using populations often described as WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, relatively Rich, and embedded in particular forms of Democratic societies.

In 2022, Latin American researchers edited Cognitive Sciences and Education in Non-WEIRD Populations: A Latin American Perspective, bringing together research with socially and ethnically diverse populations across the region and arguing for a Cognitive Science more attentive to social, affective, moral, political, and interpersonal dimensions.

This does not mean that research conducted in Boston, London, or Berlin is wrong.

The question is different:

How far can we universalize before testing whether the same regularity holds in Manaus, Bogotá, Cusco, or an Indigenous territory?

Sometimes the problem lies in the task itself

In the Brazilian Amazon, we find a very concrete example.

In 2024, Camila Bezerra, Noeli Toledo, and colleagues developed and validated the Brazilian Indigenous Cognitive Assessment — BRICA with a multiethnic urban Indigenous community in Manaus.

The challenge was not simply to lower the cutoff score for people with fewer years of schooling.

The assessment itself needed cultural adaptation.

Words, images, tasks, and situations may not carry the same meaning across all Body-Territories.

BRICA was developed with participation from specialists and the community and validated with 141 Indigenous participants aged 50 or older.

This produces an uncomfortable question:

What if someone appears to have a cognitive difficulty because our task failed to reach what it was supposed to measure?

Now Decolonial Neuroscience is no longer only an abstract discussion.

It can change diagnosis.

But including more people still does not solve everything

We can enlarge the sample.

Include Brazil.

Chile.

Colombia.

Peru.

Indigenous peoples.

That is necessary.

But we may still continue asking exactly the same questions.

Sandra Báez and Agustín Ibáñez argued in 2023 that Global South research should not serve merely to “add diversity” to existing models. It is necessary for building better models of brain health and ageing.

And the data are beginning to show why.

In 2025, Lucas Da Ros, Eduardo Zimmer, Agustín Ibáñez, and colleagues analyzed a large Brazilian cohort together with datasets from Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay. The relative importance of social and health factors for cognition and functional ability differed across countries.

Another Latin American study published in 2025 evaluated 2,211 people across six countries and incorporated a social exposome:

education;

food insecurity;

financial resources;

healthcare access;

childhood experiences;

trauma;

and other conditions accumulated throughout life.

These combinations were associated with differences in cognition, functioning, and brain characteristics in specific populations.

This does not mean:

“poverty determines the brain.”

It means:

a brain never arrives at the laboratory alone.

A history arrives with it.

Who constructed the category?

Here Danilo Silva Guimarães helps us take another step.

A professor at the Institute of Psychology of the University of São Paulo, Danilo works with Indigenous Psychology and has been questioning rigid categories used to represent human experience.

In 2025, while discussing fixed identities, he showed how historical and ambiguous experiences may be compressed into discrete classifications that are administratively useful but can also produce forms of erasure.

In another text from the same year, he proposed an especially important idea:

universality and generality do not need to mean homogeneity and exclusion.

This changes our criticism.

We do not need to abandon the search for mechanisms shared across the human species.

We can search for universals.

But we need to ask:

Does what we call universal remain true when other Body-Territories also participate in constructing the question?

A category can be useful and still hide something

Imagine a gradient:

blue
→ blue-violet
→ violet.

To organize data, at some point we need to draw a boundary.

Blue on this side.

Violet on the other.

The boundary can be useful.

But that does not mean nature drew a line exactly there.

Something similar may happen when we use:

normal / abnormal

typical / atypical

healthy / ill

cognitive / emotional

individual / social.

Perhaps one of our most important questions is:

Did we discover a boundary in the phenomenon, or did we place a boundary there so that we could study it?

Those are not the same thing.

Perhaps “normal” is also a local optimum

At BrainLatam we have already discussed local optima.

We create a category.

It works.

We publish.

Other researchers use it.

We create better tests.

We train specialists.

The more the category works, the more knowledge we produce inside it.

That is valuable.

Until, perhaps, we stop searching for what it cannot perceive.

The danger of a local optimum is not that it is completely wrong. It is that it works well enough for us to stop searching outside it.

Latin American Neuroscience also faces limitations that arise before an experiment even begins.

In 2022, Ana Silva, Elaine Del-Bel, Zulma Dueñas, Valeria Ramirez-Castañeda, and other researchers highlighted inequalities in funding, infrastructure, language, opportunities, and visibility that shape who is able to produce Neuroscience in the region.

This leads us to our Question Zero:

Who had the conditions to consider this question important?

And perhaps a Question Minus One:

Which question was never asked because nobody in that laboratory had the territory, language, or experience required to imagine it?

Ancestral words can open windows

This is where words from the peoples of our Biomes enter BrainLatam.

Not as evidence.

Not as mysticism.

Not to replace statistics, EEG, fNIRS, or MRI.

They can enter as heuristic windows.

A word may allow a variable to appear that our usual jargon never placed inside the experiment.

Tekoha

In 2023, Kaiowá researcher Izaque João described tekoha as a place in which it becomes possible to live according to one’s own way of existence, involving autonomy, relationships, territory, and cosmological dimensions.

BrainLatam can ask:

When we call all of this merely “environment,” which variables disappear?

Jiwasa

Jiwasa, in Aymara, opens another question:

When we measure cooperation merely as “me helping the other,” can we perceive what emerges when the outcome begins to be represented as “ours”?

It does not replace cooperation.

It expands the question.

Yãy hã mĩy

Among the Tikmũ’ũn/Maxakali, Yãy hã mĩy is associated with transformation; Sueli and Isael Maxakali describe imitation and transformation as deeply connected in their presentation of the concept.

BrainLatam does not translate this into a theory of neuroplasticity.

In the Extended Yãy hã mĩy, we ask:

Are we measuring only what someone learned to repeat, or also their capacity to perceive, vary, and transform what they learned?

A new word does not deliver a new truth.

It may deliver a new question.

And what about our own words?

Here we need to apply the criticism to ourselves.

BrainLatam also produces concepts.

Tensional Selves is one of them.

But a coherent Decolonial Neuroscience cannot transform Tensional Selves into a new “true Self.”

They must remain a hypothesis.

We can investigate whether what we experience as “self” changes with:

attention;

physiological state;

memory;

relationships;

context;

territory.

If evidence contradicts the hypothesis, we need to modify it.

The same must apply to:

Body-Territory;

Jiwasa;

Extended Yãy hã mĩy;

or any word we create tomorrow.

Decolonizing also means not colonizing the future with our own categories.

Multiplying the question

Danilo Guimarães’ contribution to Indigenous Psychology helps us perceive another difference.

In his 2022 work, he discusses the need to construct Psychology in dialogue with Indigenous experiences and knowledge rather than simply applying finished psychological categories onto these worlds.

This leads to a methodological transformation.

Not only:

“How do we measure memory in this population?”

But also:

“What does this population call remembering that our task never attempted to measure?”

Not only:

“How can we adapt our category to the other?”

But:

“Can the encounter with the other transform our own category?”

This is very different.

It is the movement from:

translating the other into our Science

to:

allowing the encounter with the other to multiply the Science we are capable of doing.

Science, Politics, and Religion return to us

Finally, we can bring everything back to first-person experience.

Religion → Expecting / Transcending

What model of a human being am I taking as my reference?

Politics → Judging / Choosing

Which ruler am I using to classify the other?

Science → Doing

What happens when I apply that classification to reality?

And Religare asks:

When someone does not fit my category, can I revise the category — or do I begin trying to correct the person so that they fit inside it?

Perhaps this is one of the central questions of Decolonial Neuroscience.

The cut is necessary. Life is not cut into pieces.

We can study:

neurons;

networks;

brains;

behavior.

Then move upward:

brain
→ Body-Territory
→ relationships
→ language
→ community
→ Tekoha
→ State
→ Biome.

And move downward again.

At every transition:

What is the evidence?

What is the mediation?

What was left out?

Because we need to isolate in order to know.

But we do not live in isolation.

BrainLatam Question

When our measure says that someone falls outside what we call “normal,” can we first ask whether we found a difference in that Body-Territory — or merely the limit of a category we ourselves learned to repeat?

Latin American References — post-2021

Guimarães, D. S. (2022). A Tarefa Histórica da Psicologia Indígena diante dos 60 anos da Regulamentação da Psicologia no Brasil. Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão, 42. Discussion of Indigenous Psychology and knowledge production in dialogue with different worlds of experience.

Silva, A.; Iyer, K.; Cirulli, F.; Del-Bel, E.; Dueñas, Z.; Ramirez-Castañeda, V. et al. (2022). Addressing the opportunity gap in the Latin American neuroscience community. Nature Neuroscience, 25, 1115–1118.

Alves, M. V.; Ekuni, R.; Hermida, M. J.; Valle-Lisboa, J. et al., eds. (2022). Cognitive Sciences and Education in Non-WEIRD Populations: A Latin American Perspective. Springer.

Báez, S.; Alladi, S.; Ibáñez, A. (2023). Global South research is critical for understanding brain health, ageing and dementia. Clinical and Translational Medicine, 13, e1486.

João, I. (2023). Autonomia kaiowá e guarani: a ação dos ñanderu e ñandesy na criação do tekoha. Revista de Antropologia, 66.

Bezerra, C. C.; Toledo, N. N.; da Silva, D. F. et al. (2024). Culturally adapted cognitive assessment tool for Indigenous communities in Brazil: Content, construct, and criterion validity. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 16(2), e12591.

Fittipaldi, S.; Legaz, A.; Maito, M.; Hernández, H.; Ibáñez, A. et al. (2024). Heterogeneous factors influence social cognition across diverse settings in brain health and age-related diseases. Nature Mental Health, 2, 63–75.

Guimarães, D. S. (2025). Identidades fixas não descrevem as experiências de muitas pessoas e produzem apagamentos históricos. Jornal da USP.

Guimarães, D. S. (2025). Universalidade e generalidade não significam homogeneidade e exclusão. Jornal da USP.

Da Ros, L. U.; Borelli, W. V.; Aguzzoli, C. S.; Zimmer, E. R.; Ibáñez, A. et al. (2025). Social and health disparities associated with healthy brain ageing in Brazil and in other Latin American countries. The Lancet Global Health, 13, e277–e284.

Migeot, J.; Pina-Escudero, S. D.; Hernández, H.; Fittipaldi, S.; Ibáñez, A. et al. (2025). Social exposome and brain health outcomes of dementia across Latin America. Nature Communications, 16, 8196.

Original conceptual source

Sueli Maxakali and Isael Maxakali — Yãy hã mĩy. Tikmũ’ũn/Maxakali curatorship in the Mundos Indígenas exhibition at Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG. It is cited here to preserve the origin of the concept; the Extended Yãy hã mĩy is a BrainLatam elaboration, not a literal translation.

“No word — European, Amerindian, or BrainLatam — should close perception. A good word should reopen it.”