Who Decides When You Believe You Decided on Your Own?

When Words Begin to Trap Us

BrainLatam Special Series — SBNeC 2026

Let us begin somewhere familiar.

We open our phones.

We see a face.

A news story.

One sentence irritates us.

Another calms us.

Something feels familiar.

We keep scrolling.

Hours or days later, we need to choose:

buy;

share;

believe;

or vote.

Then we say:

“I decided.”

And we probably did.

But we can investigate together an earlier question:

When did that decision actually begin?

At the moment of choice?

Or much earlier, when some experience taught us what to expect, fear, desire, or recognize?

Perhaps the decision begins before “I chose”

We do not arrive at any choice empty.

We arrive with:

memories;

histories;

fears;

affects;

values;

important people;

previous experiences.

A word can meet a memory.

A memory can create an expectation.

That expectation can change how we feel about what comes next.

And then our attention moves.

We can look together at one possible spiral:

experience
→ memory
→ expectation
→ emotion
→ attention
→ judgment
→ action.

Then action creates another experience.

And everything begins again.

We do not need to accept this sequence as a closed truth.

We can test it.

Religion, Politics, and Science may already be happening within us

BrainLatam proposes a simple analogy.

Religion → Expecting / Transcending → Legislative

When we represent:

“this should happen”

or:

“this cannot happen.”

Politics → Judging / Choosing → Judiciary

When we ask:

“among these possibilities, which one do I consider better?”

Science → Doing → Executive

When we act and encounter the consequences.

We are not saying that institutional religion, party politics, and academic science are the same thing.

We are asking whether their fundamental operations also appear in first-person experience.

And if they do, perhaps we can observe them within ourselves.

Before judging, perhaps we have already felt

Think of something you reject immediately.

It could be a person.

A word.

A political party.

A food.

A song.

Why did the reaction appear so quickly?

Perhaps we do not know.

But we do know that the Body-Territory has a history.

What we have lived participates in what we expect.

And what we expect may participate in what we feel.

Our BrainLatam hypothesis is not:

“Religion is emotion.”

It is more careful:

Our layer of values, meanings, memories, and expectations may participate in the way a possibility is felt before it is judged.

Perhaps some decisions begin there.

Yãy hã mĩy can open a window

The Tikmũ’ũn/Maxakali offer us the concept Yãy hã mĩy, related to transformation.

We do not want to reduce an ancestral word to a quick translation.

But we can allow it to open a question.

We learn a great deal by observing.

We imitate.

We repeat.

We incorporate.

Then something begins to feel:

natural.

obvious.

mine.

But does everything we have learned to repeat need to keep being repeated?

In the Extended Yãy hã mĩy, BrainLatam proposes a sequence:

observe
→ imitate
→ repeat
→ perceive
→ vary
→ transform.

Perhaps freedom does not mean never imitating.

Perhaps it also means noticing when we are already capable of transforming what we learned.

Does this happen to us online?

Now we can look together at the phone again.

We click.

The platform records.

We spend more time with a certain type of content.

It learns something about our behavior.

Then it shows us something similar.

We react again.

We have another spiral:

attention
→ click
→ data
→ prediction
→ recommendation
→ new attention.

And what if we connect the two?

Our spiral

memory
→ expectation
→ emotion
→ attention
→ judgment.

The platform’s spiral

attention
→ data
→ recommendation
→ new attention.

Now a more interesting question appears than:

“Does the algorithm control you?”

We can ask:

What happens when a machine learns which contents are most effective at capturing our attention precisely because they encounter something that already exists in our history?

We are not outside this relationship.

We also train the system while it participates in what we will see next.

We are in this spiral together.

Jiwasa.

And what about money?

Attention has economic value.

Those with more resources can:

appear more often;

advertise more;

test more messages;

segment audiences;

repeat more.

That does not mean automatically buying a decision.

But it may mean having greater power of repetition.

Then we can begin asking:

Why did I see this so many times?

Who paid for it to appear?

What did not appear?

That last question may be the most important.

Because we are influenced not only by what we perceive.

We are also shaped by possibilities that never entered our perceptual field.

And when the moment to vote arrives?

Imagine a message that makes us represent:

“If this candidate wins, something very important to me will be threatened.”

That representation may produce emotion.

Emotion may make certain contents more salient.

We click.

We see more.

We remember more.

Then we arrive at the ballot box.

And we say:

“I chose.”

Yes.

But we can add:

Which future was I trying to move toward — or avoid — when I chose?

That question gives some agency back.

Religare: observing our own choice while it happens

Perhaps this is where Religare finds a simple function.

We do not need to step outside life in order to observe our consciousness.

We can ask:

What am I expecting?

What am I feeling?

What captured my attention?

Why am I judging this way?

What am I about to do?

And then:

Does the result confirm what I expected?

So we have:

Expect
→ Feel
→ Judge
→ Do
→ Observe
→ Revise.

None of these steps needs to be perfect.

What matters is that the spiral remains open.

Perhaps autonomy is not choosing without influence

We never choose without influence.

We have:

family;

territory;

culture;

language;

memory;

emotion;

technology;

relationships.

Perhaps autonomy does not mean eliminating all of that.

Perhaps it means increasing our capacity to notice:

what is participating in the choice while there is still time to choose differently.

Here Science, Politics, and Religion stop being distant subjects.

They return to us.

What do I expect?

How do I judge?

What do I do?

And, in Jiwasa:

what are our choices doing to us, to others, and to the territory we share?

BrainLatam Question

Before saying “I chose,” can we notice together what we learned to expect, what that expectation made us feel, and whether we can still transform what we learned to repeat?

References and conceptual windows

Pessoa, L. (2022). The Entangled Brain. MIT Press. Integrates perception, cognition, emotion, motivation, and action from the perspective of interdependent systems.

Bernal, F. A. et al. (2022). Argentine research on repetition, emotional valence, attention, and decision-making.

Aruguete, N.; Calvo, E. et al. (2024). Experiments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia showing that different framings of factually equivalent information can produce different emotional and engagement responses.

Sueli Maxakali and Isael Maxakali. Yãy hã mĩy, in the Tikmũ’ũn/Maxakali context, related to transformation. The Extended Yãy hã mĩy is a BrainLatam elaboration and not a literal translation of the original concept.