Mild Cognitive Impairment: when the future appears in the small asymmetries of the now

First-Person Consciousness • Decolonial Neuroscience • Brain Bee • The Feeling and Knowing Taá

The Feeling and Knowing Taá — the instant I realize something has changed

There is a very subtle moment — almost imperceptible — when I feel that something in me does not respond the way it used to.
A word that takes longer to come,
a decision that hesitates,
a name that gets stuck on the tip of my tongue.

It is not illness, it is not moral failure, and it is not “aging badly.”
It is a micro-mismatch between my body that feels and my body that knows.
As if the tensional connections of my Damasian Mind were taking a little longer to stitch together the flow of the world.

This tiny, intimate instant is exactly the territory where Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) lives.
And before I understand the science, I feel this terrain — Taá.
I feel that my body is trying to reorganize, that my DNA (DANA) is searching for alternative routes, that my memories want to remain whole.

In this thin space, I remember the song “Gracias a la Vida” by Violeta Parra, which does not sing about loss, but about the delicacy of perceiving the world with a little more awareness.
Many older people say that MCI is precisely this:
a slower way of perceiving, yet deeper — as if life were asking for a different rhythm.

The study and its scientific question

(search hint: Scientific Reports 2025 mild cognitive impairment fNIRS biomarkers)

The article we examine uses fNIRS to investigate how people with Mild Cognitive Impairment show hemodynamic changes — especially in the prefrontal cortex — during memory and decision-making tasks.

The question is clear:

• Is there a physiological pattern that precedes dementia?
  
  

• Can we measure it before functional losses become large?
  
  

This search is not just technological — it is existential.
It is an attempt to listen to what the body says before the social narrative calls it “decline.”

Methods — how light reveals what we do not yet notice

The authors use a modern fNIRS pipeline with:

• GLM (General Linear Model) to estimate response betas,
  
  

• short-channels to remove extracortical signals,
  
  

• an individually modeled HRF, acknowledging that each brain “breathes light” in its own way,
  
  

• ICA/PCA to extract systemic noise (breathing, vasomotor activity, heartbeats),
  
  

• between-group comparisons and multivariate analyses.
  
  

The focus is on the coherence of the prefrontal response:
in people with MCI, activation is lower, more dispersed and slower.

The hemodynamics lose fine synchrony with the task, as if the brain were trying to compensate for small internal failures using alternative strategies.

Results — the body saying “I am still here, but I need time”

The findings show:

• decreased amplitude of the hemodynamic response,
  
  

• greater trial-to-trial variability,
  
  

• delays in peak latency,
  
  

• compensatory recruitment of lateral regions.
  
  

It is as if the mind, once more linear, became more curved, slower, more poetic even, searching for side paths.
The body does not collapse: it reorganizes.

Reading through our concepts

Damasian Mind

Interoception and hemodynamic proprioception begin to lose resolution, creating internal “noise” that demands more cognitive effort.

Tensional Selves

The Tensional Self of decision and the Tensional Self of memory no longer align perfectly — there is misalignment, but not rupture.

Zone 1 / Zone 2 / Zone 3

• Zone 1 (automatized routines) is no longer enough to sustain complex tasks.
  
  

• Zone 2 is still possible, but it requires a safe, slow, loving environment.
  
  

• Zone 3 — fear, pressure, acceleration — intensifies deficits.
  
  

Human Quorum Sensing (QSH)

MCI is also a disturbance of social synchronization:
the world moves faster than the body’s internal time.

Yãy hã mĩy (Maxakali origin)

To imitate in order to relearn — the person with MCI needs to repeat gestures, sounds, routines.
Not as regression, but as reconstruction.
It is a return to the foundation of human learning.

DANA

DNA is still trying to reorganize circuits — plasticity is reduced, but present.

BrainLatam2026 Avatar — in a light, fluid way

To understand this phenomenon, I naturally turn to the avatar Math/Hep, who observes the world through rhythms, variations and small asymmetries in the data.
MCI is exactly that:
a slight statistical deviation announcing a large existential deviation,
showing that even the most complex brain follows cycles, curves and transitions.

Crack of Decolonization — when I notice the word is too narrow

I also realize that even my words have been colonized.
That the language I use to think the world was shaped to reduce me:

• to reduce my mind to a deficit,
  
  

• my body to a defective machine,
  
  

• my old age to a problem.
  
  

But when I feel my body before I think — when Taá manifests — I realize there is no separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory).
What colonizes is not just history:
it is the word that prevents us from existing as whole beings.

Every scientific discovery, when read with courage, is a crack of freedom —
an opportunity to break out of Zone 3 and give the body back its right to age with dignity, not with labels.

Implications for education, health and public policy in Latin America

• Training community health workers to detect early signs of MCI.
  
  

• Slower urban environments — banks, hospitals and public offices with rhythms compatible with the older person’s time.
  
  

• Cultural programs for memory, especially group singing and ancestral storytelling.
  
  

• Intergenerational care policies — young people learning from elders and vice versa.
  
  

• The right to a “cognitive city”: proper lighting, quiet, resting spaces.
  
  

• Access to diagnostic fNIRS as an affordable public policy tool.
  
  

Scientific search keywords

“mild cognitive impairment fNIRS prefrontal hemodynamics Scientific Reports 2025 HRF variability aging biomarkers short-channels GLM”

When Two Brains Receive the Same World - Cooperation, synchrony, and the shared rhythm of attention

Embodied Singing -Voice, interoception, and Body-Territory in vocal expertise

Pleasant Odors and the Breath that Organizes Us - How smell organizes brain–body coupling

Architecture That Thinks With Me - Turning corners and the attentional cost of built environments

Auditory Approach Bias From Birth - How newborns and adults code the desire to listen

Beta Waves and the Moment I Truly Decide - The prefrontal cortex as the space where "feeling" becomes "choosing"

How My Brain Encodes Voice in Midlife - F0, listening effort, and the vitality of human hearing

Learning Beside Another Brain - Hyperscanning and the pedagogy of co-presence

Reproducibility in fNIRS - When can I trust the hemodynamic curve I see?

HRfunc and the True Shape of the Hemodynamic Response - Why every brain breathes light in its own way

Mixed Reality and Decision-Making - How the brain evaluates prototypes and hybrid worlds

Intense Exercise and the Awakening of Zone 2 - The hemodynamics of effort and the body that generates intelligence

Buttoning a Shirt - Everyday actions as windows into attention, gesture, and consciousness

Depression, tDCS, and the Prefrontal Cortex - Reigniting silent circuits

Designing fNIRS Studies in Real-World Environments - Why science must step outside the laboratory to exist

Transformers and Virtual Short-Channels - AI cleaning brain signals and retelling hemodynamics

Mental Fatigue and Performance - When the head gives up before the body

Cold Water and the Brain - Oxygenation, cold, and the consciousness of the limit

Walking After Stroke - Cognitive–motor interference in everyday life

Balance and the Cerebellum in Parkinson’s Disease - Movement, tensions, and reorganization of the Body-Territory

Freezing of Gait and the Loss of the Body’s Own Quorum - When the body stops trusting the next step

Children With Cochlear Implants - Learning to hear through the brain, not just the device

Emotional Processing in Children With Oppositional Behavior - Regulation, conflict, and the birth of Tensional Selves

Mild Cognitive Impairment - Early hemodynamic signs and presence in the world

Pain, Apathy, and Depression in Dementia - When feeling and thinking stop walking together

Cognitive Load - How much does fNIRS really feel my mental effort?

The Brain in Daily Life -Assisted horsemanship, sport, and embodied enjoyment

Linguistic Jiwasa - When language thinks the world

Dialogical Multiplication and Indigenous Psychology - How to let psychology listen without erasing the Other

The Feeling and Knowing Taá of Christmas 

Republican Capitalism of Spirits without Bodies

NIRS fNIRS EEG ERP Multimodal NIRS-EEG

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