The body does not keep the score: Trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability

“Understanding trauma as a dysregulation of metastability may also dissolve a long-standing paradox in mental health: why so many diverse treatments—exposure therapy, EMDR, mindfulness, exercise, psychedelics, flow-inducing pursuits—can all succeed. Each, in its own way, restores flexible coupling between large-scale networks, quiets maladaptive self-referential loops, and rebalances neuromodulation. The mechanism is not specific content but dynamic reorganization.”

Article Abstract

For nearly a decade, the idea that “the body keeps the score” has shaped public and clinical understanding of trauma (van der Kolk, 2014). It is an enticing metaphor—implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh, that the body bears the scars of what the mind cannot face. Yet recent advances in computational and systems neuroscience reveal that this image, while emotionally compelling, is biologically inaccurate. The body proper does not store trauma; the brain dynamically reenacts it through maladaptive inference. What endures after trauma is not a memory lodged in non-innervated tissue but a collapse of flexibility—a loss of metastability, the brain’s ability to fluidly switch among semi-stable network states.

In computational terms, trauma over-weights the precision of danger priors: the brain assigns excessive confidence to threat predictions, constraining inference based on the prior premise of enduring danger. The result is hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance—symptoms of a system caught in self-confirming predictions. Mathematically, this overconfidence means one cannot escape local minima—in a free energy landscape—that become deeply and precisely engrained (i.e., trapped in a ravine with steep sides, where precision corresponds to the local curvature or steepness).

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Article Access

Open Access

Kotler, S., Mannino, M., Fox, G., & Friston, K. (2026). The body does not keep the score: Trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 20, 1812957.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957