Can We Teach the Body to Perceive Movements That Did Not Exist for It Before?

Perhaps learning is not only about acquiring a new movement, but about becoming able to feel new possibilities within the body and the technologies we already possess

Imagine a sprinter leaving the starting blocks.

They already know how to run.

They have trained for years.

Their body knows acceleration, force, foot contact, rhythm, and speed.

Then the coach says:

“Apply the force a little earlier.”

The instruction may be technically correct.

The athlete may understand it perfectly.

But understanding a sentence does not necessarily mean being able to perceive, within one’s own body, where the movement that needs to change actually is.

Now imagine another situation.

While running, the athlete receives visual, auditory, and tactile information almost in real time.

The environment begins to reveal differences that were already occurring, but that the body could not yet distinguish with enough precision.

The athlete does not receive new legs.

They do not receive new muscles.

They receive new possibilities for perceiving what their own body is already doing.

In 2026, Zifu Xu, Ziyu Wang, and Gang Qin published a study in Scientific Reports using extended reality — XR — and multisensory feedback to optimize sprint technique.

The original question was about sports performance.

For BrainLatam, however, it can become much larger:

If we change what an organism is able to perceive about its own movement, can we expand what it perceives as possible?

An environment that gives more information back to the body

Xu and colleagues studied 30 national-level sprinters.

Participants were assigned to three conditions:

multisensory XR feedback,

traditional video feedback,

and a control group.

The intervention lasted 12 weeks and was followed by a retention assessment four weeks later.

The researchers did not look only at speed.

They measured performance in the 30- and 100-meter sprints, biomechanics through motion capture and force platforms, as well as neurophysiological measures using EEG and fNIRS.

This makes the study particularly interesting.

The question was not simply:

“Did the athlete run faster?”

It was also:

“What changed in the way the athlete produced the movement?”

The XR group showed a reported improvement of approximately 2.81% in the 30-meter sprint, together with biomechanical adaptations mainly related to the timing of force application.

Changes were also reported in EEG and fNIRS measures, interpreted by the authors as compatible with greater neural efficiency.

We need to be careful here.

Lower activity in a given measure does not automatically mean “a better brain.”

In addition, Scientific Reports initially made an unedited version of the manuscript available, and the trial was retrospectively registered.

So these are interesting and promising findings, not definitive conclusions.

But one point is especially relevant to our question:

part of the learning remained even after the training had ended.

Knowing is not necessarily feeling

A coach can show a video and say:

“Look here.”

The athlete sees it.

Understands it.

May even be able to explain the error.

But running at high speed requires something different.

There is no time to consciously formulate a sentence during every stride:

“Now I am going to change the timing of force in this leg.”

The movement has to become available to the organism.

Perhaps this is where multisensory feedback becomes especially interesting.

It does not merely provide an explanation.

It may help make perceptible a difference that was previously difficult to feel.

Here we need to make an important distinction.

Xu and colleagues did not directly demonstrate an increase in interoception.

The study was not designed to measure that.

But BrainLatam can broaden the question:

Can we give the Body-Territory more possibilities for sensing what is happening within and around it?

This sensing may involve proprioceptive and exteroceptive information and, in other experimental designs, interoceptive information as well.

Perhaps learning a new action depends, in part, on learning to distinguish signals that were already present but had not yet become sufficiently accessible to perception.

APUS: a movement may exist and still not exist for me

At BrainLatam, we use APUS to think about the perceived field of possible movements available to a Body-Territory.

Xu and colleagues did not measure APUS.

That is our conceptual extension.

But the study allows us to formulate a very concrete question.

Imagine that, from a biomechanical point of view, an athlete is capable of producing a more efficient movement.

The physical possibility exists.

But they cannot yet perform it consistently.

Perhaps they cannot even clearly perceive the difference between what they are currently doing and what they could do.

Then we have three different levels:

the physically possible movement;

the movement perceived as possible;

the movement that has already become part of the available repertoire.

Perhaps learning is precisely about crossing the distances between these levels.

In this sense:

Expanding APUS may not only mean offering new movements. It may mean expanding what the Body-Territory is able to perceive about movements already taking place.

The local optimum of movement

Here the previous blog returns.

An experienced runner has already found a way to run.

It works.

It may work very well.

And precisely because it works well, it may become difficult to perceive it as only one among several possible solutions.

This is what we metaphorically call a local optimum.

It is not necessarily an error.

It is a solution efficient enough to reduce the need for further exploration.

The body trusts it.

That trust allows speed and automatization.

But it may also hide other movements.

XR does not create a new body.

It may provide enough information for the same body to perceive:

“There is another way to organize what I am already doing.”

And this takes us beyond sport.

What if thinking also consists of movements?

When we reason, we also use learned repertoires.

Categories.

Words.

Beliefs.

Semantic relationships.

Habitual ways of interpreting events.

Perhaps we can think about cognitive movements in a way similar to physical movements.

In the previous blog, we asked when habit or belief can become a local optimum.

In the blog about confusion, we asked:

“What if confusion is the moment we begin to think differently?”

Now we can connect those ideas.

Imagine that a piece of information contradicts something we believe.

There is incongruity.

For a moment, our model no longer works perfectly.

But that does not mean we will necessarily construct a new one.

We can use language itself to remain exactly where we were.

Semantics can also protect a local optimum

Imagine two people confronted with information that contradicts a previous belief.

One says:

“Maybe I am wrong.”

Another says:

“This is a lie.”

Another:

“Whoever said this is the enemy.”

Another:

“Those people simply do not understand.”

The event may be the same.

But the semantics used reorganize what the event means.

In some cases, a new word may open a possibility.

In others, it may quickly close the window created by confusion and reconstruct the same previous model.

This leads to another BrainLatam hypothesis:

When we enter a state of confusion, the semantic relationships we choose may expand or narrow the cognitive movements that begin to appear possible.

Language can function as a technology.

We may not necessarily need new words.

Perhaps we need to discover new relationships among the words we already possess.

Same technology, different movement

The sprinter continues using the same legs.

What changes is the possibility of perceiving and reorganizing how those legs are used.

Perhaps something similar can happen with language.

We continue using Portuguese.

Spanish.

Guarani.

Aymara.

Or any other language.

But a word can acquire new relationships.

Think about:

failure.

One Body-Territory may have learned:

failure → shame → threat → hide.

Another semantic movement could be:

failure → information → updating → try again.

The word is still “failure.”

But the repertoire of movements it opens is no longer the same.

This allows us to formulate a provocative idea:

Perhaps high cognitive performance does not always require a new technology of words. It may require new semantic possibilities within the linguistic technology we already use.

As a hypothesis, we might imagine a cognitive-semantic dimension of APUS:

which interpretations, questions, and responses can a Body-Territory perceive as available when facing a particular situation?

Can the environment offer new semantics?

In Xu's experiment, the environment gives the athlete additional information about their movement.

What if we did something similar during cognitive processes?

When a person reaches a conclusion, we could ask:

What word did you use to describe the problem?

What other word could describe it?

What changes if “threat” becomes “incongruity”?

If “failure” becomes “feedback”?

If “enemy” becomes “someone using a different model”?

This does not mean that every reality can be changed simply by changing words.

That would be naive.

Material territories exist.

Violence exists.

Inequality exists.

But words also participate in how we organize our movements in response to those conditions.

And perhaps this can be studied.

EEG could track moments of incongruity and updating.

Eye-tracking could examine attention.

fNIRS could help investigate more naturalistic tasks.

Physiological measures could add information about what is happening in the body.

And we could ask:

When a new semantic relationship appears, does the number of alternatives a person can imagine also increase?

The Latin American question

This question is especially important for Latin America.

Our territories coexist with different languages, cosmologies, and ways of organizing knowledge.

Perhaps one of the greatest limitations of importing technologies, educational models, or public policies is assuming that offering the same tool automatically means offering the same possibilities.

It is not enough to provide technology.

We need to ask:

What movements does it allow people to perceive?

It is not enough to teach words.

We need to ask:

What semantic worlds do those words make possible?

It is not enough to tell someone:

“You can.”

Perhaps we need to build bodily, social, and territorial conditions in which that possibility can actually appear.

This is where APUS stops being merely a question about sport.

Where the article ends and BrainLatam begins

Xu, Wang, and Qin reported that 12 weeks of multisensory XR feedback were associated with improvements in performance, biomechanical adaptations, and changes in neurophysiological measures in sprinters.

Up to this point:

Xu and colleagues.

The study did not measure APUS.

It did not investigate semantics.

It did not demonstrate increased interoception.

From this point onward:

BrainLatam.

Our question is:

If an environment can provide information that makes new motor organizations more accessible to the body, can we build environments that also make new cognitive organizations more perceptible?

And then:

Can we expand APUS by offering not only new physical movements, but new possibilities for sensing, interpreting, and naming what is already happening?

Perhaps learning is not only about adding something to the organism.

Perhaps it is also about allowing the organism to perceive something that was already in front of it — or within it — but that it could not yet distinguish.

The runner still has the same legs.

We often still have the same words.

But perhaps high performance begins when we discover:

other movements within the same body.

other semantics within the same language.

other possibilities within the same territory.

Neuro Challenge Latam

Think of a word you frequently use to explain a problem in your life.

If you changed the semantic relationship surrounding that word, what new movements might begin to appear as possible?

Scientific Reference

Xu, Z., Wang, Z., & Qin, G. (2026). An XR-based multisensory feedback system for real-time sprint technique optimization in track athletes. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-60240-3